Case Study and Your System of Ethics

Please plan to begin your research and writing this week. This assignment has three main sections, as follows.

Select an organization that has dealt with significant internal or external ethical issues recently. Examples are listed below. This will be the foundation of your case study. To complete your case study, you will need to conduct research on your selected organization and consider the ethical issues you find to be involved with it. You will also need to locate the organization’s own code of ethics, if it has one. Most publish their codes online. There are examples of codes of ethics in our modules this week. If your organization doesn’t have an explicit code of ethics, research general codes of ethics for your organization’s type (business, legal, journalistic, or medical, for example). Be prepared not only to describe your organization’s ethical issues and to furnish specific evidence of them but also to note whether and how these ethical issues have violated the organization’s own code. You’re going to use the ethics concepts from this course, coupled with your own system of ethics, to analyze these ethical issues by following the outline provided.

Make your own personal system of ethics explicit in order to prepare your reader for your analysis of your selected case (organization and ethical issues). You don’t need to write a manifesto; rather, you should lay out your system as simply as you can, with support from our course concepts (lessons and readings) where it’s useful. For example, you could say that you believe in moderation, but it’s much more interesting to note that like Aristotle, you see virtue in it (good place for a citation!). Find your own balance of the personal and the academic. This is a chance for you to show off who you are and what you’ve learned here.

Use your own personal system of ethics to analyze your selected case. Provide your own analysis based on your own personal system of ethics of how the organization and its issues are problematic and how a solution, if there is one, might be reached.

Note: This is an APA paper that uses and cites course material (textbook and lessons) and includes at least three additional high-quality sources as support. For these additional three sources, you might choose further work by philosophers or conflict resolution providers we’ve covered, work by philosophers or thinkers from outside this course, work by scholars who are thinking about the same issues you are, or commentary from media experts who are looking at the organization and its issues in the press. Whatever you do, do not rely on Google; use the library to find high-quality sources and make sure you understand who and what they are so that you’re aware of things like authority and bias.

The paper will include the following sections. Some sections will be one paragraph; others may be more than one.

Introduction/thesis: Provide a strong introductory paragraph with a guiding sentence that lets your reader know what your paper will cover and why.
Facts: Describe the organization, any important events, and the related ethical issues. What has happened, and what is happening now? Has the organization violated its own professional code of ethics? How can you tell?
Personal Ethical Philosophy: You’re taking a break from the organization and its ethical issues. Here, you’ll explain your own personal system of ethics, both what it was before you took this class and how it has developed via our course concepts and your own research.
Analysis: Use your own personal system of ethics to analyze the organization and its ethical issues. Make sure always to relate your statements about the organization and its ethical issues back to your own standards of behavior as outlined in number 3, above.
Resolution and/or Conclusion: If you see a possible resolution of this organization’s ethical issues, present it clearly. Again, relate it back to your own standards of behavior as outlined in number 3, above. If there is no resolution that you can see, that’s perfectly fine. You can use a more standard conclusion that restates and adds value.
Organizations With Recent Ethical Issues (examples, and you may find your own)
United Airlines (dragged a bloodied passenger off of a flight)
21st Century Fox and Bill O’Reilly (sexual assault/cover-ups)
Facebook (data harvesting and its impact on the 2016 U.S. election)
Uber (alleged use of a software dubbed Greyball to avoid regulators in geographic regions where it was operating illegally)
The Weinstein Company (multiple sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein/cover-ups)
Equifax (data breaches)
Samsung (bribery charges)
Kobe Steel/Mitsubishi Materials (Japan and corporate governance)
Wells Fargo (fake accounts)
Apple (slowed-down phones as a sales tool)
Ohio State University (abuse of students by coaches and staff)
Mylan (EpiPen price gouging)
Samsung (battery recall)