Utilitarianism Theory
Question:
Discuss about the Corporate Social Responsibility and Western Philosophy.
There are various guidelines and principles followed by a business corporation and companies. These guidelines are mainly based on the human behaviour and nature. Therefore the field of business ethics deals with the problems which arise in the business environment. It can be said that morality and ethical theory are not synonymous. Morality is about the principles or rules which decided whether people are right or wrong. Ethical theory mainly gives guidelines which justifies an action which can be consider as right or wrong during settling down the conflicts between the individuals.
This report mainly deals with the theories related to utilitarianism and Kantian deontology and others something connected to justice and relativism theory. . It also contains an incident which portrays the real life ethical problems. Finally there is evaluation of the future plans of the business professionals which has a positive or negative impact in the society.
The utilitarian theory always emphasis upon that action considered as good or bad which is founded on the consequence of the action and its impact on large number of human being. The inaugurator of this type of theory is Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (Paquette et al., 2015). Therefore, it can be said that utilitarianism is the principles of particular activities is assessed on ethical ground pillared on a bunch of decorum that can be beneficial to maximum number of people. Utilitarian is mainly focused on the instrument of cost benefit analysis and risk assessment in the organizations and office mainly adapting right decisions at the right time. This type of principles in office or organization is applied because if the manager or the leaders do things, which are based on the interest of the customers and the employees, then at last the company will be benefitted.
Kantian deontology puts emphasis on the action which is regarded to be virtuous if the principles are considered as the universal law and acceptable to everyone (Blay et al., 2016) . A philosopher Immanuel Kant who stayed in Germany initially introduces this. He supported that ethicsshould accompany a bunch of guidelines and principles. Kantianism also stresses on respecting each individual with dignity. No person should be utilized for any benefit .This denotes the fact that each person is compelled to perform their responsibilities to in order to scrutinize the fact that their actions are principally right or not (Dierksmeier,2013). It can be said there are controversy on Kantian deontology mainly for the shallowness and insufficiency of this theory to handle varieties of virtuous issues such as there is no existence of proper support or outcome when the limitation of the rights and duties are passed over.
Another western ethical theory is Justice. This theory is considered as the eminence of gaining equal and just behaviour. According to Nozick, every individual has the authority as wells as righteous to own property if is acquired in a just way without snatching the rights of the other people. A person who believes in free will or libertarianism in the world of economy and government always supports the idea of free market, which is no more inspired by government policies or public services. When an company or organization or individual is charged by the government mainly due to their assets that is obtained without any cheating, in liberalism believers in business considers this action to be not justified even if the money is donated to public schools, hospitals, jails or fire departments . Hence it can be said that this type of western thoughts always denotes absolute power. For example, this type of thought is not at all beneficial to the people because if a country exports all its grain products to another country so that they can achieve better revenue and do not pay any heed about the starvation experienced by its people, then it reflects the narrowness of this philosophy. It can be also related to a company in which the employee or organization always thinks about that he or she has the full right to do anything then it is very much harmful for the employees or the customers. Rawl’s theory of justice is also known as ‘Justice as Fairness’ (Singer, 2015). There are two main principles in this theory. The first principle is mainly about each individual of having equal rights to a proper distribution of social goods such as education; food and housing .The second principle mainly put emphasis on the fact that is there is social and economic inequalities then the deprived persons should be considered at first. Therefore, indifferent from Nozick’s libertarianism, Rawl theory always believes in the redistribution of wealth and taxes to those specifically those who are not economically sound.
Kantian Deontology Theory
The right theory mainly puts emphasis that human rights should be free from the manipulation of other factors. Human right is the fundamental rights of a person, which is obtained, by a person by his or her birth. There are mainly two types of human rights; positive and negative rights. Positive rights are the moral value, which stress the people to do his or her duty. On the other hand, negative rights are the honest principles imposed on people to eradicate them from interrupting with other people independence. One of the major arguments concerning to the rights theory is the deficiency supervising which enables to evaluate which right is more valuable than the other. Thus
for this reason it can be said that in a office or organization there is a leader or a manager to coordinate the organization.
Business ethical values can be expanded and defined as Corporate Social Responsibility. CSR can be defined as a system of corporate self-regulation inclusive into a business model. CSR policy functions as a self-functional instrument on the other hand a business supervises and resembles its duty with the spirit of the law, ethical theories and national or international norms and values.
The Bento Rodriguez dam disaster occurred on 5th November 2015 (Agurto?Detzel et al., 2016). It is mainly about the dam failure. An iron ore tailings dam in Bento Rodriguez a sub district of Mariana faced dam failure. This failure caused the death of 17 persons, moreover 16 people were injured. According to biologist and ecologist Andrew Ruschi, who studies marine biology at the Estacao Biologia Marinha Augusto Ruschi in Santa Cruz, Espírito Santo, the waste of the iron ore would take at least decades to dilute the levels in anyplace near previous levels. On 9 November, the city of Governador Valadares eradicated the intake of water because the mud on the Rio Doce. The next day, a State of Public Calamity was declared mainly for the scarcity of the water in the city (Teixeira et al., 2015).
On 22 November, the waste of this dam reached the Atlantic Ocean. The toxic mud has spread across the Espírito Santo coast, where the cities shut down the accessibility of the sea beach (Lodge, 2015). According to the Environmentalists, it has a huge impact in Abrolhos Marine National Park wildlife. The park is regarded as the vital importance to the Brazilian ecosystem since its beginning (Knox, 2015).
Samarco Mineração SA, the Brazilian mining company supervised this dam and Santarém dams are part of the Germano mine which is established in the district of Santa Rita Durão, a municipality of Mariana. The tailings dams were mainly constructed to gather the waste which comes from the extraction of iron ore extracted from extensive mines in the region.
It is revealed in January 2016 those 14 months before the incident the Samarco had been warned that there was a possibility of the dam collapses. The engineer of this dam was hired part-time as a consultant to inspect the dam. A technical report of this engineer from September 2014 reflected that severe structural problems on the dam (Fonseca & Ávila Filho,2016). Hence it can be said that it was the irresponsibility of the two companies who did not take the problem seriously. Rather they claimed that they were not seriously warned about this problem. They also accepted the fact that it occurred due to the technical faults of the designer of the dam (Hooshyaripor & Tahershamsi, 2015).
Justice Theory
The Minas Gerais government suspended Samarco’s work quickly after the occurrence of the horrible incident. The Brazilian government charged extra amount of money Samarco R$250 million (US$66.3million) for the incident. In January 2016, the Brazilian government and Samarco came to a compromise in a charge of R$20 billion (US$4.8 billion). But the money does not integrated compensation to people who faced the incident. The penalty does not include the cost of recovering the polluted area.
It can be observed from the above incident that the disaster occurred mainly due to the irresponsibility of the corporate persons. They only focused on their own benefits. They did not focus on the well being of the people. Thus, in this context Corporate Social Responsibility based on business ethics can be applied to the organizations. CSR is mainly designated to help the organization to fulfill its mission as well as serve as a guide to what the company represents for its consumers (Bhaduri & Selarka, 2016). Business ethics is the part of applied ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that can emerge in the environment of a organization. (Hoffman, Frederick & Schwartz eds., 2014). The laws of the Corporate Social Responsibility can be linked to the theories of liberalism, utilitarianism and Kantian ideologies.
The good-will of the Kantian ideology means the act of a sense of moral obligation or duty (Bowie, 2017). According to Kant moral action is not that in which the person does the good things out of his or her wish, but that person does the good things out of obligation or duty. Hence, it can be considered that that this theory can be included in business ethics because if the Brazilian company and Germano mine has behaved with this ideology then such disaster has not happened. This theory must be integrated into Corporate Social Responsibility (Shaw & Shaw, 2014).
The negative aspect of this ‘good-will’ ideology is that in particular cases this moral binding becomes a burden to someone (Koehn, 2014). For example a manager or leader of a company has also to think about the benefits of the company along with the obligation of the duties towards its customers and employees.
The ‘universal law’ designated that any principle which can be “universalized” is one which is applicable to all person without any variation (Yazdani & Murad 2015) . Thus Kant’s ethics depends on giving some meaning to what it is to act “inconsistently.” The core idea of the Categorical Imperative is to eliminate any act of principles which would clearly denote the outrageously immoral conduct.
This rule is applicable in a company or organization to maintain a proper code of conduct and norms equally to all the members. Whereas some rules or principles cannot be universalized in some office or organization if the code of conduct goes negatively affects the employees or the customers. It has to be flexible. Even this is same in individual life.
Conclusion
Finally, it can be concluded that there must be a business ethics in a company or a organization which is a part of Corporate Social Responsibility. The Kantian viewpoint has positive aspects as well as the negative aspects. It depends on the business organization that whether they will apply the theory in positive or negative way. Thus, the Brazilian mines and the Germano mine should rectify their policies based on these theories in positive aspects if they do not want to hamper the
References
Agurto?Detzel, H., Bianchi, M., Assumpção, M., Schimmel, M., Collaço, B., Ciardelli, C., … & Calhau, J. (2016). The tailings dam failure of 5 November 2015 in SE Brazil and its preceding seismic sequence. Geophysical Research Letters, 43(10), 4929-4936.
Bhaduri, S. N., & Selarka, E. (2016). Corporate Social Responsibility Around the World—An Overview of Theoretical Framework, and Evolution. In Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility of Indian Companies (pp. 11-32). Springer Singapore.
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Bowie, N.E., ( 2017). Business ethics : A Kantian perspective. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Dierksmeier, C. (2013). Kant on virtue .Journal of Business Ethics, 113, no. 4 ( 2013) : 597-609.
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Hoffman, W. M., Frederick, R. E., & Schwartz, M. S. (Eds.). (2014). Business ethics: Readings and cases in corporate morality. John Wiley & Sons.
Hooshyaripor, F., & Tahershamsi, A. (2015). Effect of reservoir side slopes on dam-break flood waves. Engineering Applications of Computational Fluid Mechanics, 9(1), 458-468.
Knox, J. H. (2015). Environmental Disasters and Human Rights.
Koehn, D. ( 2014). Kantian Virtue Ethics in the Context of Business : How Practically Useful Can it be? Business Ethical Journal Review, 2(3), 15-21.
Lodge, M. (2015). An environmental disaster in Brazil raises highly problematic risk and regulation issues. LSE Business Review.
Paquette, M., Sommerfeldt, E. J., & Kent, M.L. ( 2015). Do the ends justify the means ? Dialogue, development , and communication, and deontological ethics. Public Relations Review.41 (1), 30-39.
Shaw, J. J., & Shaw, H. J. (2014). A Philosophical Foundation for Corporate Social Responsibility: Lessons from Kant’s Transcendental Idealism as an Exercise in Life Against Kelsen’s Formalistic Legal Theory as an Exercise in Logic. In Ethics, Governance and Corporate Crime: Challenges and Consequences (pp. 177-212). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Singer, A. ( 2015). There is no Rawlison theory of corporate governanace”. Business Ethics Quarterly 25, no.01 ( 2015) : 65-92.
Teixeira, L. E., Caux, J., Beluco, A., Bertoldo, I., Louzada, J. A. S., & Eifler, R. C. (2015). Feasibility Study of a Hydro PV Hybrid System Operating at a Dam for Water Supply in Southern Brazil. Journal of Power and Energy Engineering, 3(09), 70.
Yazdani , N., & Murad, H.S. ( 2015). Toward an ethical theory of organization. Journal of Business Ethics 127, no.2 ( 2015) :399-417.
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