ETHICS IN BUSINESS AND SOCIETY
AN ETHICAL DILEMMA: Producing toys - child's play?
(From: Crane and Matten (2010) business ethics OUP Oxford.)
You are the product manager of a confectionery company that includes small plastic toys with its chocolate sweets. Having met a potential Thai manufacturer of these toys at a trade fair in Europe, you now visit the company in the north-eastern part of Thailand to finalize a two-year supply contract. Arriving there and talking to the sales manager, you are able to arrange a deal that supplies you with the toys at a third of the cost currently charged by your Portuguese supplier, but with equivalent quality and supply arrangements.In order to check the reliability of the manufacturing process you ask the manager to show you around the place. You are surprised to find out that there is no real workshop on the premises. Rather, the production process is organized such that at 6am, about 30 men line up at the company's gate, load large boxes with toy components on their little carts ormotor-scooters and take the material to their homes.
Your prospective supplier then takes you to one of these places where you see a large family, sitting in a garage-like barn assembling the toys. Not only are the mother and father doing the job, but also the couple's six children, aged 5 to 14, who are working busily - and from what you see, very cheerfully - together with the parents, while the grandmother is looking after the food in an adjacent room. In the evening, at around 8pm, the day's work is done, the assembled toys are stored back in the boxes and taken to the workshop of the company, where the men receive their payment for the finished goods. At the end of the week, the toys are shipped to the customers in Europe.
As you have never come across such a pattern of manufacturing, your Thai partner explains to you that this is a very common and well-established practice in this part of the country, and one which guarantees a good level of,quality. Satisfied, you tell the Thai manager that you will conclude the paperwork once you get back home, and you leave the company offices happy in the knowledge of the cost savings you're going to make, and quietly confident that it will result in a healthy bonus for you at the end of the year.
On your way back, while buying some souvenirs for your five- and seven-year-old nieces at the airport, you suddenly start wondering if you would like to see them growing up the same way as the child workers that you have just employed to make your company's toys.
Essay requirements
For this essay you are required to place yourself in the role of the product manager and apply the learning and skills you have developed in this module to;
a) Use a Kantian deontological framework and principlesto consider the issues raised by the case for those affected by any decision you make;
b) Apply the principles to enable you to decide what you should do and ;
c) Explain and justify the decision, again drawing on Kantian ethical theory.
General Requirements
- 1000 words
- The essay should be written in prose/narrative style and not in sections or report style with lots of sub headings
- For the purpose of this guidance the content of the three aspects identified can be summarized to include the following:
a) What was taken into consideration
b) What was decided and,
c) Why this particular decision is an appropriate Kantian response.
a) What was taken into consideration
- This will include the introduction and the background of the theory to be used.
- Weak answers will simply repeat the case study content. This is NOT the requirement. Do No repeat the case study!
- Good answers will outline the Categorical Imperative and introduce the three principles (formulations) that Kant uses to assist us to apply his reasoning.
- These answers will then use those ideas to show how members of the supply chain and members of the family will be benefitted or 'injured' by different responses.
- Strong answers will go further by showing how and why Kant would recommend some responses and reject others.
Include a least 5 reference.
- Ethics Theory & Business Practice - Mick Fryer
b) What was decided
- The decisions should consist of a short statement of no more than 50 words.
- These conditions are entailed in the explanation and justification which follows.
c) Why this particular decision is an appropriate Kantian response
- This part will include the conclusion but also a discussion of the three formulations
1. The 'universal' principle that asks 'what if everyone did as I am proposing to do?
2. The injunction never to use others as a 'means' solely for our own purposes but to recognise each individual as the bearer of 'ends' i.e. goals, aspirations and potential of their own which must be respected and defended and
3. The test which may be referred to as the 'Facebook' or 'New York Times' or 'Grandmother' test i.e. would an objective and unaffected spectator accept that what one did and WHY one did it was reasonable, ethical and justified?