Common Ethical Issues in Business

Part 1: (2 pages) ٍ DQ 1. (What are sanctuary cities) & (Sanctuary Cities) attached. Sanctuary cities have been in the U.S. news quite a bit recently. Read the (2) articles on sanctuary cities posted on Blackboard and do your own online research on this subject. Discuss the pros and cons of sanctuary cities using the utilitarian as well as the deontological (rights, duties, fairness, justice) perspectives. How would you decide? Why? ___________________________________ Part 2: (2 pages) DQ 2. Based on your review of the readings and video clips this week, summarize your key learnings. Your post must synthesize key learnings from at least one of the video clips and 2 different articles. About 2 pages. Readings: Chapters 4 + 8 – Trevino & Nelson Article: Why good employees do bad things (attached) Article: Ethical decision making Prentice (attached) Video: Grey’s Anatomy: Dilemma in Healthcare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF1CmtKyHNw Video: Extreme Measures: What would you do? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ1BkH1ucfc Video: Shopping while black https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAkDHuimJRc As a general rule, your posts in the Discussion Board must be the equivalent of about 2 typed pages of each part (at 12 pt font size – 1.5 line spacing). ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Note: read the below overview before start writing (about the topic of this week). Ethics Week Overview: As we enter the third week of our course, I want you to think about the importance of context and framing in ethical decision making, and the causes of ethical blindness. Some of this is not in the text book but notes from my ethics class discussions. I encourage you to watch the video at the bottom – another example of obedience to authority and comment in the general reflections section of the forum if you like. Unethical behavior: • Can be intentional or unintentional • Not just bad people doing bad things • Often good people doing bad things, without being aware of it • Can result from context or situations that contribute to unethical behavior • Context can sometimes be stronger than reason and values (bad barrels) • Which leads to ethical blindness • The context in which an individual makes a decision, can affect its outcome • With “Narrow” framing, individuals look at the dilemma or problem in isolation or with limited options and overlook the full range of alternatives available Some of the root causes of ethical blindness are: • Fixation on goals • Conflicting goals and pressure • Rationalization • Detachment / insensitivity • Desire to conform to group (peers) • Obedience to authority – the willingness of adults to go to any length to obey the authority • Arrogance (rules do not apply to me) • Intensity of goals (fixation on goals) and competitiveness or an unbalanced pursuit of purpose can sometimes distort our judgments at critical moments, unless disciplined by clear values • Conflicting goals and pressure – satisfying different stakeholder needs, pressures from superiors • Denial and justification to explain unethical behavior • Fixation and rationalization eventually leads to detachment – separation of head from heart • Peer pressure can be positive or negative • Sometimes people are afraid of speaking up against wrongdoing, because they might get yelled at by the boss or feel pressured to conform by their peers • How do you think peer pressure might impact your decisions? • Competitiveness and goal-seeking can drive out compassion and fairness • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbIZu68psFM (5 mins) Marry a Stranger