MGT610 Final Term Subjective

MGT610- Business Ethics Solved Subjective

For Final Term Exam Preparation

Question: In what sense does Galbraith deserve a medal for freedom?

Answer: In the sense that a certain conception of freedom does underlie his thinking. This is what is called "positive" freedom. It means a condition whereby people are provided by government, and at the expense of other people, with what they could use to advance their lot. Such provisions would "free" them to move forward. The freedom of the American founders is quite different, mainly backed by a different idea of human nature. It is that people in communities require first and foremost not to be thwarted in their efforts to make headway in life. Others may not be conscripted into involuntary servitude to provide them with what they might need because if they are not thwarted by them, they will be able to do this on their own. Not equally rapidly, not to the same extent, perhaps, but if they only apply themselves, they will flourish without coercing others. Galbraith has never championed this kind of "negative" freedom. So his views are alien to the American political tradition. It is not surprising, then, that he receives the Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton, someone who has done nothing at all to further freedom in this truly American sense. To Galbraith's minor credit, however, he did, a few years ago, finally admit that capitalism is a far better economic system than socialism. He did this only in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Empire. And even then with great reservations and regret. He was asked, in an interview published in Alitalia's October 1996 "in flight" magazine: " You spoke of the failure of socialism. Do you see this as a total failure, a counterproductive alternative?" He replies this way: "I'd make a distinction here. What failed was the entrepreneurial state, but it had some beneficial effect. I do not believe that there are any radical alternatives, but there are correctives. The only alternative socialism, that is the alternative to the market economy, has failed. The market system is here to stay." Question: Internet privacy forms a subset of computer privacy. Experts in the field of Internet privacy have a consensus that Internet privacy does not really exist. Privacy advocates believe that it should exist. Do you agree or not with this statement? Explain your arguments with real life examples.

Answer: Internet privacy consists of privacy over the media of the Internet: the ability to control what information one reveals about oneself over the Internet, and to control who can access that information. Many people use the term to mean universal Internet privacy: every user of the Internet possessing Internet privacy. People with only a casual interest in Internet privacy need not achieve total anonymity. Regular Internet users with an eye to privacy may succeed in achieving a desirable level of privacy through careful disclosure of personal information and by avoiding spyware. The revelation of IP addresses, non-personally-identifiable profiling, and so on might become acceptable trade-offs for the convenience that such users would otherwise lose in using the workarounds needed to suppress such details rigorously. On the other hand, some people desire much stronger privacy. In that case, they may use Internet anonymity to ensure privacy — use of the Internet without giving any third parties the ability to link the Internet activities to personally-identifiable information of the Internet user. Question: Why do companies develop ethics programs?

Answer: Ethics should govern all human activity; there is no reason to exempt business activity from ethical scrutiny. Business is a cooperative activity whose very existence requires ethical behavior. Another more developed argument points out that no activity, business included, could be carried out in an ethical vacuum. Question: organizational factors of oligopolistic competition Define at least five which lead companies to engage in unethical practices.

Answer: 1. Crowded and Mature Market - When large numbers of new entrants or declining demand create overcapacity in a market, the resulting decline in revenues and profits creates pressures on middle-level managers. They may respond by allowing, encouraging, and even ordering their sales teams to engage in price fixing. 2. Job-Order Nature of Business - If orders are priced individually so that pricing decisions are made frequently and at low levels of the organization, collusion among low-level salespeople is more likely. 3. Undifferentiated Products - When the product offered by each company in an industry is so similar to those of other companies that they must compete on price alone by continually reducing prices, salespeople come to feel that the only way to keep prices from collapsing is by getting together and fixing prices. 4. Culture of the Business - When an organization's salespeople feel that price fixing is a common practice and is desired, condoned, accepted, rationalized, and even encouraged by the organization, price fixing is more likely. 5. Personnel Practices - When managers are evaluated and rewarded solely or primarily on the basis of profits and volume so that bonuses, commissions, advancement, and other rewards are dependent on these objectives, they will come to believe that the company wants them to achieve these objectives regardless of the means. 6. Pricing Decisions - When organizations are decentralized so that pricing decisions are pushed down into the hands of a lower part of the organization, price fixing is more likely to happen. Price decisions should be made at higher organizational levels. 7. Trade Associations - Allowing salespeople to meet with competitors in trade association meetings will encourage them to talk about pricing and to begin to engage in price setting arrangements with their counterparts in competing firms. 8. Corporate Legal Staff - When legal departments fail to provide guidance to sales staff until after a problem has occurred, price-fixing problems are more likely.

How Adam smith or Utilitarian are criticized

marks 3

Locke's critics focus on four weaknesses in his argument:

1. The assumption that individuals have natural rights: This assumption is unproven and assumes that the rights to liberty and property should take precedence over all other rights. If humans do not have the overriding rights to liberty and property, then the fact that free markets would preserve the rights does not mean a great deal.
2. The conflict between natural (negative) rights and positive rights: Why should negative rights such as liberty take precedence over positive rights? Critics argue, in fact, that we have no reason to believe that the rights to liberty and property are overriding.
3. The conflict between natural rights and justice: Free markets create unjust inequalities, and people who have no property or who are unable to work will not be able to live. As a result, without government intervention, the gap between the richest and poorest will widen until large disparities of wealth emerge. Unless government intervenes to adjust the distribution of property that results from free markets, large groups of citizens will remain at a subsistence level while others grow ever wealthier.
4. Individualistic assumptions and their conflicts with the ethics of caring: Locke assumes that people are individuals first, independent of their communities. But humans are born dependent on others, and without caring relationships, no human could survive. The degree of liberty a person has depends on what the person can do. The less a person can do, the less he is free to do. But a person's abilities depend on what he learns from those who care for him as well as on what others care to help him to do or allow him to do.

About Galbraith Affluent Society

Marks 3

In the Affluent Society Galbraith asserts that classical economic theory was true for the eras before the present, which were times of "poverty"; now, however, we have moved from a state of poverty into an age of

How far must manufacturer and their representatives go to make their product and services completely safe? The ―due care‖ view holds then that, because consumers must depend on the greater expertise of the manufacturer, the manufacturer not only has a duty to deliver a product that lives up to the express and implied claims about it, but also has a duty to exercise due care to prevent others from being injured by the product even if the manufacturer violates this duty and is negligent when there is a failure to exercise the care that a reasonable person could have foreseen would be necessary to prevent others from being harmed by use of the product. Due care must enter into the design of the product, the choice of reliable materials for constructing the product, the manufacturing processes involved in putting the product together, the quality control used to test and monitor production, and the warnings, labels, and instructions attached to the product. In each of these areas, according to the due care view, the manufacturer, in virtue of a greater expertise and knowledge, has a positive duty to take whatever as possible, and the customers has a right to such assurance. Failure to take such steps is a breach of the moral duty to exercise due care and a violation of the injured person’s right to expect such care – a right that rests on the consumer’s need to rely on the manufacturer’s expertise.

Explain ethics of conserving depletable resources marks 5

Conservation refers to the saving or rationing of natural resources for later use. Conservation, therefore, looks primarily to the future: to the need to limit consumption now to have resources available for tomorrow. In fact, even pollution control can be seen as a form of conservation, since pollution consumes air and water. However, there are basic differences between the problems of pollution and the problems of resource depletion that makes the term conservation more applicable to the latter problems than to the former. With some notable exception (such as nuclear wastes), most forms of pollution affect present generations, and their control will benefit present generations. The depletion of most scarce resources, however, lies far in the depletion of resources is primarily by posterity and not by present generations. Consequently, our concern over the depletion of resources is primarily a concern for future generations and for the benefits that will be available to them.

Social costs view of the manufacturer's duties marks 3

A third theory on the duties of the manufacturer would extend the manufacturer’s duties beyond those imposed by contractual relationships and beyond those imposed by the duty to exercise due care in preventing injury or harm. This third theory holds that a manufacturer should pay the costs of nay injuries sustained through any defects in the product, even when the manufacturer exercised all due care in the design and manufacture of the product and has taken all reasonable precautions to warn users of every foreseen danger. According to this third theory a manufacturer has a duty to assume the risks of even those injuries that arise out of defects in the product that no one could reasonably have foreseen or eliminated. The theory is strong version of the doctrine of caveat vendor: let the seller take care.