BLAW2010 - Business Ethics

This course engages students in thinking about ethical issues that contemporary business leaders confront, and it encourages students to critically assess alternative approaches to ethical decision making in business. The course begins by reviewing high-profile examples of unethical business conduct, and then explores why ethics are important inside and outside the business world. Next, the course outlines several of the primary ethical theories in the western philosophical tradition, and it guides students in applying those theories to ethical quandaries in both business and nonbusiness contexts. After this introduction to ethics, the course turns to a deeper examination of business leaders? ethical duties. What are those duties, and to whom are they owed? This part of the course begins by considering the role of business in American society. Against that backdrop, the course then asks students to apply concepts such as empathy and the equal moral worth of persons, to contemplate the extent to which corporate leaders may (or may not) owe duties to the corporation?s employees, to members of society generally, and/or to the environment?as well as to the corporation?s shareholders.
1 Credits