Business Ethics Chapter 8 Question & Answer

A care ethics that seeks to replace conventional morality will have difficulties with using impartial reasoning when it is called for, with responsibilities to distant others or to unborn generations, and with balancing caring for others against self-sacrifice. An ethic of care that adds to, rather than replaces, conventional ethical approaches to problematic business situations can work around these difficulties.

Care ethics emphasizes perceiving the needs of people involved in a problematic business situation. It emphasizes the decision-maker’s responsibilities to the people involved and to the relationships between them. It emphasizes the importance of attending to particular people and to special relationships in our ethical reasoning.

Whether through upbringing or biology, women appear to have a different way of approaching ethical decisions than do men. A feminist ethics of care seeks to bring the different ethical perspective of women out of the domestic sphere and into the public sphere of paid work.

Conditioned power, which is the ability to dominate through internalized beliefs and attitudes, enabled the subordination of women to men. Historically, both men and women accepted an oppressive conceptual framework whose unquestioned assumptions legitimized male domination. Feminists have effectively criticized the naturalness and normalness of these assumptions, and the patriarchal conceptual framework is losing its hold on people.

Democratic states, which need their citizens to learn to treat each other as moral equals, did not try to change family values because they respected a right to family privacy.

In old-fashioned families, men worked for pay outside the home, and women worked for no pay inside the home. This division of labour created a situation in which men controlled the family’s financial resources and in which society valued men’s public work more highly than it did women’s domestic work. Children learned that this was a natural and normal state of affairs, and, as a result, traditional families did not teach a gender-neutral sense of justice.

One consequence of this division of family labour was structural inequality of opportunity in the workplace. When women joined the workforce, they often found that implicit job specifications included having men’s physiques or having men’s traditional freedom from responsibility for the care of dependent others.

Historically, families involved specialization and the division of family labour between men, who acquired the public virtues of business life, and women, who acquired the domestic virtues of family life.