Analysis Assignment

First, to apply the key principles of utilitarianism and to identify the limitations to the application of utilitarianism to ethical decision making.

OK, let’s get to the key principles of utilitarianism. The first is the greatest good for the greatest number. It’s probably a phrase you’ve heard before. I’ll use an example to try to bring it to life. So let’s say that your company is in some economic difficulty. You’re considering a downsizing of the workforce, say 10%, in order to keep the company solvent. OK.

You calculate, hmm, who’s benefited from this decision? Well, the stockholders, the owners of the corporation would be benefited, obviously. The consumers might be benefited, and the suppliers, in that you’re staying in business.

Who might be harmed by it? Well, certainly the employees who are laid off are going to be harmed by it. And even some of the remaining employees who have to do extra work and so forth, they might be harmed, too. But it still might be an ethical decision according to utilitarianism because the benefit to the stockholders, owners, to the consumers, to the suppliers outweighs the cost to the employees who are affected.

And so yeah, it’s the greatest good for the greatest number. This gets, then, to the second principle, which is the ends justify the means. The means in my downsizing example cause harm or are harm. You’re laying people off. You’re causing them, perhaps, great economic distress. It’s really bad. But the ends, the positive of your decision, outweighs it, perhaps. And so therefore, according to utilitarianism, it’s an ethical decision.

So utilitarianism focuses on the ends, not the means. Almost anything can go with utilitarianism. Literally anything could go in terms of behavior decision making, as long as the ends justify it.

OK. Be aware that this perspective underlies stakeholder analysis, a term you’ve seen before and you’ll see again. The idea is simply that in order to do a stakeholder analysis, you have to list out all those affected by the decision that you’re contemplating, and then what a utilitarian would say you do is weigh out the positive and the negative effect. And so stakeholder analysis and utilitarianism go hand in hand.

OK. In utilitarianism, harm to the minority can outweigh benefit to the majority. So some things are wrong even if more people are benefited than harmed. Le met use a kind of silly example. I’ll admit it’s silly. You’re walking down the street, and somebody pushes you over and grabs your purse or your wallet or something, and takes out a $10 bill, runs away, goes to the bank, gets 1,000 pennies for the $10, stands on the corner, and hands out a penny to the first 1,000 people that walk by.

So let’s do a stakeholder analysis here. There is, I guess you could say, 1,001 stakeholders. 1,000 people are benefited, the people who get a penny, and there’s one stakeholder harmed, you, who just got pushed over and had $10 stolen from you.

Now I would argue that even though there’s 1,000 people benefited and one person harmed, ultimately a utilitarian would conclude the decision to push you over to take your $10 and give a penny to 1,000 people was unethical because the harm to you is greater than the aggregate benefit to the 10,000. So I guess all this means is that it’s not a simple count of those stakeholders positively and negatively affected. It’s really important to discuss and to weigh out the positives and the negatives in terms of the magnitude of the effect. It can be a lot on some stakeholders. It can be not so much on others.

OK. I’m going to talk about limitations. I’m seeing this perspective, this ethical decision tool like the others in the sense that you’re trying to decide if it’s right for you. It might be a little bit like shopping, where you’re trying to decide if the product is right for you. You may be looking at a car, a phone, or even a sweater, and you’re going, wow, these features are great. I really like this about it. I like the color. I like this, I like that. You might say utilitarianism, yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me. I think about utilitarianism a lot even though I don’t call it that. I’m constantly weighing out the pros and cons of my decisions.

Somebody texts me, how about we go to a movie over the weekend, what I’ll do, probably, is I’ll say to myself, well, what are the positives? Well, I want to hang out with this person. I want to see the movie. But then you weigh the negatives. Well, I promised somebody else I’m going to do something with them on Saturday night. I don’t want to spend $10, $12. So you weigh it out and you make your decision.

So you’re using this all the time. Why not use it for business ethics? So it has a lot of features, but we need to talk about the limitations, too, so if you do use it, you

understand that it is, for you, for sure, given all the considerations, the right decision tool. First of all, it could be argued that sometimes harm cannot be outweighed by any benefit, that sometimes actions are just fundamentally wrong. You might say, I don’t care what ends you’re thinking about. Murder is wrong. I’m not going to murder anybody. I’m not going to even look at the ends. It’s just not something I’m going to consider.

And to talk about another ethical decision tool here just for a second, Universalism. Of course, a Universalist would say there are some things that are fundamentally wrong.

Calculating the harm and benefit can be difficult. You might have heard this expression– well, it’s not a silly example, it’s more of a literary one. I think it was Sir Walter Scott who said, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive.” And there have been plays and movies and books that use that basic plot line.

You might have experienced it in your own life. Have you ever told what you thought may be a white lie, and then you forgot you told it and you told somebody else something else. And then you had to come up with another lie to cover up that lie. And pretty soon then you told a third lie to make sure everything was on the same page. But then you forgot you did that. And pretty soon you don’t know who you told what, and you’ve created this giant mess for yourself.

And so I think the argument is that the ends can never be truly foreseen. The focus needs to be on the means, as is the case with Universalism. The Universalism perspective, or ethical decision tool, is another one of the three that I’ll be talking about, of course.

I’ll use one more example I like. I don’t know. It’s a book I just read, I read recently. It’s about a guy who figures out a way to go back in time. And his great hero in history was John F. Kennedy, and he thought he was a great president, and had he lived– of course, he was assassinated– had he lived, the world would have been a much better place today.

And so he figures out, he goes back in time, and he prevents the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And he’s thinking, wow, what a great thing I did. And he takes his time portal back to the present. He comes out of it and he looks around, and he realizes that the Earth suffered a nuclear holocaust because of his change in history. And wow, I guess he kicked himself for that.

But I think the moral of the story is, again, the ends can never be truly foreseen. So looking to the future, yeah, you might think, well, I am causing some harm, but in the end it will work out

OK. Are you really fooling yourself, and can you in fact ever really know that more good will be produced than harm from the action that you’re undertaking? And I think a Universalist, as I said, would say no, that you need to focus on the means.

And biases can inappropriately affect benefit harm assessment. I have another video vault lecture that talks about biases in depth, so I won’t go into it now, just to note that you, as the decision maker in utilitarianism, could no more wait, just because it’s you, or say your family, than anybody else. And it’s easy to see how you could be biased and inappropriately assess benefit harm assessment because of personal considerations.

OK. Again, the learning objectives. Apply the key principles of utilitarianism and, of course, identify the limitations to the application of utilitarianism for ethical decision making.

Finish all 3 part

Only can use the materials given, no outside sources

• DeangelisArticle.pdf
• Utilitarianism.docx
• profitmaximization.docx
• Universalism.docx
• Assignment.docx

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