Philosophy: Ethical Decision-Making

Your paper must be no less than 3000 words, and no more than 4000 words, in length: title, author and date information, and bibliographic information, will not be included in the word count, but endnotes will be. (Please use endnotes rather than footnotes, to facilitate the word count.) As with the writing exercises, ten points will be deducted from your paper score if you fall short of the minimum word count or exceed the maximum word count. Ethical Decision-Making You are the Chief Operating Officer of a specialty clothing manufacturer with four factories located in the northeastern and midwestern United States. You are approached by the mayor of a small town in Alabama. She hopes to persuade you to open a factory in her town, which has been struggling to survive ever since the closure of an auto parts factory that was once their principal employer. The city is offering you tax breaks, free land, and a number of other incentives, which taken together will make it highly cost effective for you to open a new plant there. Unlike your current locations, Alabama is a right to work state; and environmental regulations there are much less stringent, a major factor for you since your manufacturing process generates substantial pollution. At the proposed factory site, on the banks of the river that supplies water to the town, you would have to meet much lower standards for water safety than in your current locations. Over the long term, opening this new factory would lower your costs of production, which in turn would enable you to lower prices, and increase sales and profits. You would need to close an existing factory to make this feasible; the obvious candidate for elimination is in a small town which would go into a steep economic decline if your factory there were to close. Using the seven-step decision-making procedure described in section 1.8 of DesJardin’s text, explain how you would make this decision. You need not repeat the summary of the case just given; but you must be sure to go through all of DesJardins’s steps as you develop and explain your decision.