Mgmt 3006 - Business Ethics

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MGMT3006 BUSINESS ETHICS

SEMESTER 1, 2017

Given name                        Junior Wei Jiang

Surname                                Sng

Student Number                        18246339

Email                                j.sng2@student.curtin.edu.au

Unit Name                                Business Ethics

Unit Code                                MGMT3006

Assignment Title                Case Study 1

Lecturer’s Name                        Dr Theodora Issa

Workshop Day                        Thursday

Workshop Time                        9.00am-11.00am

        Word Count                        2186

DECLARATION BY STUDENTS:

I declare the assessment ONE OF MGMT3006 is my own work and has not previously been submitted for assessment. This work complies with Curtin University rules concerning Academic Misconduct including plagiarism and copyright.

I have referred tohttps://academicintegrity.curtin.edu.au/overview/AcademicMisconduct_whatis.cfm for

plagiarism and copyright information.

I have retained a copy of this assignment for my own records.

Student Signature: Sng

Introduction

For the past, the major concern of business was just for profit. However, in today's business's world, society environment want the business to do in different ways. The society's expectation was expected that the business must be ethical rather than just make profit. In Grace, Damian and Cohen (2003, 23) had stated that “business ethics core determination was guiding a business to follow the rules and code of conduct by assisting them to protect the environment and community confidence in goods and services which they giving to their concerned stakeholders.” Moreover, business ethics is also a business that applying daily moral rules and ethics to the society and stakeholders. In business ethics, commercial morality should be fair, responsible and transparent. People in today's world will use the statement as a guideline to analyze an action and finding a correct way to act based on greatest benefits in the greatest for all (Jones and George 2009, 27). In addition, corporate social responsibility (CSR) had the biggest link with business ethics. Corporate social responsibility is a business's design to aid sustainable development by balancing the triple bottom line which is economic, social and environment and supply this to their primary and secondary stakeholders. In this essay, there have four business ethic perspectives will going to be used which is utilitarian, libertarianism, deontology and virtue. These perspectives are using to solve ethical dilemmas which faced by the organizations and also help the firm's management level to analyze the ethical issues for their business (Grace, Damian and Cohen 2003, 26).

Summary

These essay had been based on a news and articles which were showing that our sea had been covered with a lot of plastics and the plastics had been got into our daily needs which are fishes. From the case study, Smillie (2017) had stated that "shellfish lovers had eating up to 11000 plastic fragments in their seafood each year." Moreover, contaminated fish and shellfish had been found in different country and plastic-eating fish are showing up in supermarket in today's world. Thus, this had shown up the major problem we had facing now was are we eating plastic in our seafood daily? And now, where is the plastic come from? As the innovation had advanced immediately, the annual plastic production had reached 5m tons (Smillie 2017). In 2014, it had increased to 311m tons, which had shown up in diagram 1.The plastic had contained polystyrene, PVC, nylon, and polystyrene. From the Smillie (2017) articles, it stated that the researches from all around the world had to get the data over six years to 2013, and the conclusion was that there are already more than 5 trillion pieces of plastics in the world oceans, and most of them were "micro plastics." Micro plastics was the waste range between 5m to 10 nanometres and it comes from transportation. Micro plastics will also know as the tiny plastic balls found in some toothpaste, cosmetic facial scrubs. The articles also had stated that the researches had found zooplankton under a microscope is eating the micro plastics (Smillie 2017). Moreover, they found the most micro plastics had kept in mussels which we had eat around 10000 mussels in a year. Thus, the major problem had shown in this articles was how our sea environment had been polluted by contained with a lot of plastics and how the plastics got into the fish on out daily needs and also how the plastic-eating fishes had affected our health after we taking fish as our daily needs.

Diagram1:

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Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism was one of the four business ethic perspectives. Utilitarianism is also called as consequentialism.  "It assesses the behaviors according to the consequences from a moral viewpoint (Grace and Cohen 2003, 14)." Utilitarianism had shown that greatest happy had given to greatest people. Moreover, in Berger (1997, 381), it stated that "utilitarianism is aiding the individuals to the ethical preferences and perform in other's interest which will let the individuals can experience benefits from the practices." The benefits can be known as well-being or cumulative welfare. Welfare can be measuring the amount of damages or benefits received by a group or individual and also they will become satisfied when their requests had been fulfilled and had get the greatest benefits from business and also different points of views. Another explained been argued by Brad Hooker (2015) was utilitarianism is the overall welfare of benefits or damage is made to an individual neither less or more or equal a number of advantages or damage had been made to others is in the same level of importance. It had measured the morality on the greatest costs had provided the greatest benefits of an action. From this perspective, our sea had been covered by plastics which will lead to consequences of our daily needs fishes had eating plastic and also lead us to eat plastic fish which will affect our health. Mac Arthur had given a solution which is simple, he say: "instead of using these resources up, we should design the waste element out of products in the first place." (Smillie 2017). She had to work with the industry leaders to approach a design with the end of life in mind. She had to work with International Sustainability Unit (ISU) on how innovation and design can be reduced the environmental impact which is the plastic production. As a utilitarian, Mac Arthurs should bring benefits to its stakeholders such as environment, people, and society. Mac Arthur and ISU actions had trying to save the sea environment and human's health by designing a new way to reduce impact of plastic production. This actions will lead to more clean sea and also reduce the number of plastic-eating fishes and thus lead people to have a healthy lifestyle by eating their daily foods which contained fishes. Moreover, another action had shown utilitarianism was the government. The government had to set a broad agreement which is the industry needs to move towards products that maximize recycling and reuse. This had to give the greatest benefits for the society and also the greatest effort for the industries to having responsibilities to minimize the environment pollution. Therefore, this is the utilitarianism perspectives had shown in this case study on how the greatest effort had to give the people or the society the greatest benefits from their actions.