Dilemma:

A chemical engineer working in the environmental division of a computer

manufacturing firm learns that her company might be discharging unlawful
amounts of lead and arsenic into the city sewer. The city processes the sludge into
a fertilizer used by local farmers. To ensure the safety of both the discharge and
the fertilizer, the city imposes restrictive laws on the discharge of lead and
arsenic. Preliminary investigations convince the engineer that the company
should implement stronger pollution controls, but her supervisor tells her the cost
of doing so is prohibitive and that technically the company is in compliance with
the law. She is also scheduled to appear before town officials to testify in the
matter. What should she do?

Discussion:

Moral Clarity:
One responsibility is to be honest: “Issue statements or present information only in an objective and
truthful manner.”

A second responsibility is to the employer: “Act in professional matters for each employer or client as
faithful agents or trustees, avoiding conflicts of interest and never breaching confidentiality.”

A third responsibility is to the public, and also to protect the environment: “Hold paramount the safety,
health, and welfare of the public and protect the environment in performance of their professional
duties.”

Conceptual Clarity:
Professionalism requires being a faithful agent of one’s employer, but does that mean doing what one’s
supervisor directs or doing what is good for the corporation in the long run? These might be different
things, in particular when one’s supervisor is adopting a short-term view that could harm the long-term
interests of the corporation.

Informed about the facts: Obtain relevant information

The chemical engineer needs to check and recheck her findings, perhaps asking colleagues for their
perspectives. Her corporation seems to be violating the law, but is it actually doing so? We, like the
engineer, need to know more about the possible harm caused by the minute quantities of lead and
arsenic over time. How serious is it, and how likely to cause harm?
Informed about the options:
The chemical engineer might be able to suggest a new course of research that will improve the removal
of lead and arsenic. Or she might discover that the city’s laws are needlessly restrictive and should be
revised. Perhaps she can think of a way to convince her supervisor to be more open-minded about the
situation, especially given the possible damage to the corporation’s image if it should later be found in
violation of the law. Unless an emergency develops, these and other steps should be attempted before
informing authorities outside the corporation.

Well-reasoned:
Theory-1
Utilitarianism: (By John Stuart Mill 19th Century)
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines right from wrong by focusing on outcomes.

Utilitarianism holds that the most ethical choice is the one that will produce the greatest
good for the greatest number. It is the only moral framework that can be used to justify
military force or war. It is also the most common approach to moral reasoning used in
business because of the way in which it accounts for costs and benefits.

Limitations:

However, because we cannot predict the future, it’s difficult to know with certainty whether
the consequences of our actions will be good or bad. This is one of the limitations of
utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism also has trouble accounting for values such as justice and individual
rights. For example, assume a hospital has four people whose lives depend upon receiving
organ transplants: a heart, lungs, a kidney, and a liver. If a healthy person wanders into the
hospital, his organs could be harvested to save four lives at the expense of one life. This
would arguably produce the greatest good for the greatest number. But few would consider
it an acceptable course of action, let alone the most ethical one.

Generalized Form:
Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism because it rests on the idea that it is the
consequences or results of actions, laws, policies, etc. that determine whether they are good or
bad, right or wrong. In general, whatever is being evaluated, we ought to choose the one that
will produce the best overall results.
Theory-2
Theory of Justice (John Rawls)
John Rawls (b. 1921, d. 2002) was an American political philosopher in the liberal tradition.

“The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are
born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What
is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.”

Rawls's theory of justice revolves around the adaptation of two fundamental

principles of justice which would, in turn, guarantee a just and morally acceptable
society. The first principle guarantees the right of each person to have the most
extensive basic liberty compatible with the liberty of others. The second principle
states that social and economic positions are to be (a) to everyone's advantage and
(b) open to all.
Theory-3
Kant’s Theory
Basic Summary: Kant, unlike Mill, believed that certain types of actions (including murder,
theft, and lying) were absolutely prohibited, even in cases where the action would bring about
more happiness than the alternative. For Kantians, there are two questions that we must ask
ourselves whenever we decide to act: (i) Can I rationally will that everyone act as I propose to
act? If the answer is no, then we must not perform the action. (ii) Does my action respect the
goals of human beings rather than merely using them for my own purposes? Again, if the
answer is no, then we must not perform the action.

What is an imperative? An imperative is a command. So, "Pay your taxes!" is an imperative,

as are "Stop kicking me!" and "Don't kill animals!"

Basic idea: The command states, crudely, that you are not allowed to do
anything yourself that you would not be willing to allow everyone else to do as
well. You are not allowed to make exceptions for yourself. For example, if
you expect other people to keep their promises, then you are obligated to
keep your own promises.

A case study for comparing Kant’s theory with Utilitarianism

Martha, as a home-service medical care volunteer, has cared for George

through the final weeks of his fatal illness. Just before he died, George told
Martha where a large sum of money he had accumulated was stored. He
asked her to see that the money was given to the Society for Protection
against Alien Control of the Earth (SPACE). Since George's illness did not
affect his mental capacity, she agreed. But now that he has died, she is
considering using the money to support the activities of the local Hunger Task
Force, an organization that provides donated food to those who need it.
George has no surviving friends or relatives, and no one else knows about the
money. He left no written will.

Kantian analysis

To run this case through the CI procedure, we first need to identify Martha's
maxim. To do this, we look at the description of the situation and see if we can
determine which sort of principle Martha would sincerely formulate as
justification of her action. Recall that all maxims can be put into the form:

I am to do x in circumstances y in order to promote z

So we can determine the maxim by specifying what should go in for x, y and
z. The following substitutions seem plausible:

x = break a deathbed promise

y = when doing so will allow me to do much more good for humanity
z = the goal of increasing human welfare

So the three steps of the CI procedure will look like this:

Formulate the maxim: I am to break a deathbed promise when doing so will

allow me to do much more good for humanity, in order to promote the goal of
increasing human welfare.

Generalize the maxim into a law of nature: Everyone always breaks

deathbed promises when doing so allows him to do much more good for
humanity, in order to promote the goal of increasing human welfare.

Figure out the PSW: In the PSW, it will be common knowledge that people
break deathbed promises whenever they think they can do much more good
for humanity
First question: Would it be rational to adopt and act on my maxim in the
PSW? No, because in the PSW no one would ask for deathbed promises,
because everyone would know that they are not genuine commitments. The
maxim would not be an effective policy for promoting human welfare.

Since the answer to the first question is "No," Martha should not act on her
maxim, since it fails the "contradiction in conception" test.

Recall that there were two formulations of the Categorical Imperative:

Formulation I, the Formula of Universal Law [CI1]: “Act only on that

maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should
become a universal law.”

Formulation II, The Formula of the End in Itself [CI2]: “So act as to treat
humanity, both in your own person, and in the person of every other,
always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means.”

Thus, we have two main duties that derive from the CI2:
(1) the perfect duty to act on no maxims that use people as mere means.
(2) The imperfect duty to act on some maxims that foster peoples’ ends.

Criticism on Kant’s theory:

He first argued that Kantian ethics provides no specific information about what people
should do because Kant’s moral law is solely a principle of non-contradiction.[2] He
argued that Kant’s ethics lack any content and so cannot constitute a supreme principle
of morality. To illustrate this point, Hegel and his followers have presented a number of
cases in which the Formula of Universal Law either provides no meaningful answer or
gives an obviously wrong answer. Hegel used Kant’s example of being trusted with
another man’s money to argue that Kant’s Formula of Universal Law cannot determine
whether a social system of property is a morally good thing, because either answer can
entail contradictions. He also used the example of helping the poor: if everyone helped
the poor, there would be no poor left to help, so beneficence would be impossible if
universalized, making it immoral according to Kant’s model.[52] Hegel’s second criticism
was that Kant’s ethics forces humans into an internal conflict between reason and
desire. For Hegel, it is unnatural for humans to suppress their desire and subordinate it
to reason. This means that, by not addressing the tension between self-interest and
morality, Kant’s ethics cannot give humans any reason to be moral.[53]
Theory-4

Mencius Theory of Human Nature

Mencius is perhaps best–known for his claim that “[human] nature is good”. As A.C.
Graham (1967) demonstrated in a classic essay, Mencius and his contemporaries regarded
the nature of X as the characteristics that X will develop if given a healthy environment for
the kind of thing X is. A characteristic, C, can be part of the nature of X even if there exists
an X such that X does not have C. For example, language use is part of the nature of a human
being, but there are cases of humans who, due to neurological damage or simply failure to be
exposed to language prior to the onset of adolescence, fail to develop a capacity for language
use. It is even possible for C to be part of the nature of X if most instances of X do not have
C. For example, it is the nature of an orange tree to bear fruit, but the majority of orange
seeds do not even germinate, much less grow to maturity. Consequently, an important aspect
of Mencius's claim that human nature is good is that humans have a tendency to become
good if raised in an environment that is healthy for them.

Criticism:
If human nature is good, why are there so much evil in the world.
Theory-5
Thomas Hobes
Hobbes maintained that the constant back-and-forth mediation between the emotion of fear and
the emotion of hope is the defining principle of all human actions. Either fear or hope is present
at all times in all people.