Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and Cases

Rating:
Summary: A handy handbook for ethical decision making
Review: Excellent. A practical book written by academics. Many books on ethics are hard to read because of the intellectual gymnastics required. Those written by consultants and journalists are often of the cookbook type and artificial. This book is therefore not only usefulfor students but also for businessmen and consultants. This book focuses on decision making within a clearly defined framework with good definitions of the concepts used. It also includes a very good description of relevant laws in the USA. I did not realise that laws regulate so many ethical business issues. For example " The Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organisations" provide a very good framework to any company that wants to act ethically. Business ethics as defined in the book does not include obeying the law, which I think is correct. Each chapter starts with a practical but imagined case. Many of the cases deal with breaking the law or not. For example "analyse the ethical implication of a woman having to decide whether to go to bed with her boss as that is the condition be puts on her being promoted". Or " what are the ethical implications of dumping toxic substances in the river if you can get away with it by bribing the inspector". One of the principles of the book is that it does not prescribe any solutions. I think that this is pushed too far in many of these cases. I see no point in analysing the ethical implications of breaking the law. My recommendation is to eliminate all of these cases or rewrite them. However, the 15 actual legal cases are useful. They show how difficult it can be to determine what is an ethical and what is a legal issue. The subject of moral philosophies is covered in 16 pages. The authors correctly state that it is impossible to deal with this subject in any depth. The risk with this chapter is that the simplifications made are so extreme that the reader may think he has understood the essence of this topic. That is however very far from reality. These criticisms should however not discourage potential buyers of the book. Overall it is very good.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent graduate level textbook
Review: I have used this text twice in the past as a text for a graduate level course in business ethics at a university in Southern California. I will be using it again this fall and winter. I find that it has a good discussion of theory salted with good real life examples. The long cases are a little dated now, three years after publication, but still are very illustrative. (Some still have "action" occurring even now in the real world.) Within each chapter are an "Ethical Dilemma" (short case) and "A Real-Life Situation" (two-to-three page case) that help to stimulate discussion and to employ principles learned so far in the text. My students have indicated that they like this text. Obviously I do as well!