4 elements of Moral Minimum - ✔✔1. Honesty - basic expectation of humanity - have to justify NOT
telling truth
2. Loyalty- trust, confidence in others (reciprocal) develops over time
3. Keeping Commitments - following through on promises
4. Doing No Harm - applies to physical, emotional, economic well-being of people
2 Aspects of Loyalty - ✔✔(comprised of: created expectation to further friends interests; have ability
to cause harm if we don't act in those interests
Fiduciary relationships: agent-principal; legally enforceable obligations of loyalty)
Moral Reasoning in Decision Making - ✔✔1. Identify the issues (narrowly defined)
2. Which rules apply? (law? moral minimums?)
3. Analyze the facts/information (yet, you will NEVER have all of the facts)
(apply facts to principles and balancing competing obligations; excusing conditions)
4. Are there any conditions or exceptions or mitigating factors?
5.How do you minimize conflicts? (duty of loyalty to co-worker vs. employer)
6. Prioritizing (degree + likelihood of harm)
Should Batman kill the Joker - ✔✔Utilitarian: Kill one save many
Deontological: Murder is unethical
Virtue: not the man Batman wants to be
,3 most valued traits of potential employees - ✔✔1. Communication and interpersonal skills
2. team skills
3. ethics
Hedonic psychology literature documents more happy people focus on - ✔✔1. relationships/intimacy
2. religion and spirituality
3. generativity (leaving legacy and contributing to society)
Legal standards source: - ✔✔defined and applied by government processes
puts power of state behind accepted moral standards
Law and ethics venn diagram - ✔✔If an action is not legal...it's probably not moral!
All illegal actions are unethical
Legal standards may be less demanding than morals:
Soldano v. O'Daniels - ✔✔impose legal obligation to be a good Samaritan upon tavern owner
Both law and ethics are important because - ✔✔they make it possible for humans to live in social
groups
Two factors children use to distinguish moral principles from simple conventions - ✔✔fairness
harm to others
Moral relativism vs moral pluralism - ✔✔Morals can be overcome and integrated (not black and
white)
There is a plurality of ideals culture and temperaments; there is an infinite number of human ideals
Ch 37 : Notes 2 - ✔✔Business Ethics and individual Decision Making
,Moral Heuristics - ✔✔mental shortcuts used to ease the cognitive load of making a decision
KNOW: rule of thumb, educated guess, common sense, intuition
Moral Heuristics: Biases that impede people from making moral judgements - ✔✔2. Limitations of
Human Judgement
3. Obedience to Authority
4. Conformity Bias
(Peer pressure; conform when not enough info to make educated decision; aka theory of social proof)
5. In group vs out group (Theory of Special Social relativity)
6. Groupthink
(more about decision making! decisions based on what group is doing; yield to strongest personality;
assume everyone is thinking the same)
7. False Consensus Effect (assume honesty; 80% of lies are undetected; if no one else is speaking up you
shouldn't--plays into groupthink)
8. Over-optimism
(best will happen; more unreasonably optimistic the worse the situation gets)
9. Overconfidence ("I am more ethical than most people;" everybody's special)
10. Self Serving Bias
11. Framing
12. Role Morality
13. Cognitive Dissonance (screen info and reject what contradicts position)
14. Sunk Costs
15. The Tangible and the Abstract (more legitimacy to things we can see/experience; less unethical with
more separation; moral distance)
15. Time-Delay Traps (long term consequences are less important; environmental; prefer immediate
gratification)
16. Loss Aversion
17. Fundamental Attribution Error (misjudging effect of situational factors; dishes example; we do bad
things bc we have to others do bad things bc they are bad people)
, Obedience to Authority Examples - ✔✔Egil Kogh - Bud - head "Plumber" in Watergate
Right thing is defined by the person in power and absolute power corrupts absolutely
The Miligram Experiment; 85% of subjects were willing to administer pain
Acceptability heuristics- people are more concerned about acceptability to people they are accountable
to than the content of the decision itself
Self-Serving Bias - ✔✔accept what helps us and reject what hurts us; reinforce our beliefs
Confirmation Bias - prone to search for info that supports conclusion and ignore contradictions
Causal Attribution Theory - people attribute more than average credit for success and less for failure
Belief persistence: people persist in beliefs after they are discredited
Jack Video: )
Framing - ✔✔We make decisions based on context
Classic Legal Example: the leading questions asked during a trial
Marketing Example: "natural" food labels
Option framed as loss or gain
Ex: "90% fat free vs 10% fat"
This is why we "spin" things to make them sound good and to get people to agree with us.
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