Exam 2: Business Ethics and the Social Responsibility of Business

In 2002, Congress passed what legislation seeking to prevent business scandals by increasing corporate responsibility through imposing additional corporate governance requirements on publicly held corporations?

According to Jack Behrman, a professor of business ethics, free enterprise involves a:

Which arguments oppose business involvement in socially responsible activities?

Factors leading to the need for the ethical and social responsibility of business are the demands of maintaining a competitive, fair marketplace and the size and power of individual corporations.

In what way or ways are situational ethics and ethical relativism similar?

Because there are no universal, clear-cut standards to apply to ethical analysis, it is impossible to make meaningful ethical judgments.

Harvard philosopher John Rawls stressed liberty as the most important obligation owed by a society to its members.

A common criticism of ethical relativism is that it:

Not everything that is legal is also morally correct.

Kant's approach, like that of ethical fundamentalists, asserts that universal laws stem from the direct pronouncements of God.

Kohlberg observed that people progress through stages of moral development according to the major variables of:

Under a Kantian approach to ethics, a person should not lie to colleagues unless that person supports the right of all colleagues to lie to one another.

Although corporations are not persons but artificial entities created by the state, it is clear that they can and should be held morally accountable.

To a libertarian, it is not unjust for some people to accumulate fortunes while others live in poverty.

How many stages are there in Kohlberg's theory of moral development?

One criticism of utilitarianism is that it ignores justice in some important instances.

Under a strict utilitarian approach, it is ethical to force an individual to participate in a painful medical experiment if the purpose of the experiment is to develop a cure that will benefit large numbers of people.

An ethical relativist looks to a central authority, such as the Bible, to guide her in ethical decision making.