Image: Lucy Jones for the Guardian US

Case studies:

  • Purdue Pharma [Product Liability]

  • Phusion Projects [Product Safety]

  • Weyerhaeuser [Workplace Safety]

  • Knauz BMW [Speech outside the workplace]

  • Imclone [Insider trading]

  • Apple [Corporate Taxation]

  • Hobby Lobby [Corporations and Religious Beliefs]

  • Walmart [Responsibility for Supplier Behavior]

  • Goldman Sachs [Responsibility for Economic Impact]

  • Nestle [Responsibility for Environmental Impact]

  • Masterpiece Cakeshop [Refusal of service]

  • Price Waterhouse [Discrimination and “Culture Fit”]

  • BOA / Countrywide [Disparate Impact]

  • Turing Pharmaceuticals [Fair Prices]

  • 23 and me [Genetic privacy]

  • Cambridge Analytica, Facebook [Data privacy]

  • Corinthian Colleges [For-Profit Public Goods]

  • BioTexCom [Commercial Surrogacy]

  • Foxconn [Dignified work]

  • Amazon [Meaningful Work]

Business, Society, and Ethics

 

What sorts of ethical obligations do businesses have towards their customers, employees, and the public? This course will explore ethical challenges faced by modern corporations, and frameworks which can be used to develop responsible corporate policy. The course is divided into four main units: (1) autonomy and consent, (2) the scope and locus of corporate responsibility, (3) fair treatment and outcomes, (4) the limits of labor and commodification.