Business Ethics Chapter 10 Question & Answer

Self-ownership requires informational privacy because information is a financially valuable asset. However, market efficiency requires perfect competition, and perfect competition requires that consumers and producers always have full information.

Informational privacy requires that people be able to control access by others to information about themselves. Informational privacy is an efficient defence against social pressure to conform. People need to control intimate information about themselves in order to have different types of personal relationships.

Sustaining community membership and personal relationships requires that people do not readily revise their commitments, and both can be at odds with an overvaluation of personal autonomy.

Modern market economies place a high value on personal autonomy because their economic justification presupposes that individual economic actors always make decisions that are in their own rational self-interest. Liberal democracies value personal autonomy because people are less likely to make mistakes about how to lead their lives.

Coercive threats, deception, failure to disclose information, conflicts of interest, decision-making incompetence, oppressive conceptual frameworks, and emotional manipulation can diminish people’s capacity for autonomy. Severe cases of any of these conditions will excuse people from moral accountability for their decisions.

Moral autonomy is the capacity to govern oneself according one’s own ethical reasoning. Personal autonomy is the capacity to decide how to live one’s own life and to revise one’s life choices when one chooses to do so. Personal autonomy is subject to the same potential interferences as is moral autonomy.

Even though business corporations have a form of moral agency and are morally accountable for their decisions, this does not block us from also holding their shareholders, directors, officers, and managers accountable for their character flaws, motivations, and inputs to corporate decisions.

Most adult human beings are moral agents. Through their officers and employees, complex business corporations possess vicarious moral sensitivity and responsiveness. Corporations employ highly organized holistic decision-making.

Moral agency is the capacity for moral accountability. It requires sensitivity to moral situations, responsiveness to moral reasons, and the ability to make decisions.