Business Ethics
When the Truth Takes a Stretching Class
Maria Bailey clearly and blatantly misrepresented the size of her start-up business, but shrugged it off saying she knew what she was "capable of doing" and just wanted to show potential clients "what we were going to be," rather than tell them the truth about how fledgling her business actually was at that time.
Was it immoral for Mary Bailey to misrepresent her company?
Looking at the "consequential" side of her decision to fudge the truth about her company, moral decisions are made based upon what the consequences of the action will be. The results of her action actually could have several consequences. The one first and pivotal consequence Maria hopes will happen, of course, is that the fact of her deciding to embellish the truth about the size of her company will bring potential customers into her business start-up Web site fold, and soon she'll actually need the staff she now says she has on hand. If it happens fast enough for her, she'll be able to seamlessly and quickly move from a small, one-woman start-up into a flourishing company with several staff members handling several departments, and no one will ever know she lied at the outset.
According to the consequential view of happiness, if Maria is aiming at happiness for herself alone, she is an "ethical egoist" because she is only thinking of herself, not of her customers and potential customers who may not receive the excellent service they expect from her - because she is under-staffed and self-centered.
Aristotle's view of happiness (Module 1 Case) comes into play for Maria, because actually she is looking down the road at the "final good" that will come for her company, if she can grow it quickly enough to avoid someone noticing that she used fake email addresses and dropped names of executives from the likes of Blockbuster and Alamo - when in fact, she did not have those legitimate associations at all.
Utilitarianism fits within the consequentialist theory, and in utilitarianism, one's actions are correct if that action "maximizes happiness for the greatest number of people." Making a moral choice for Maria meant maximizing the possibilities of her own happiness, but she rationalized that since she didn't promise anything she could not deliver, she was justified in the fudging of the truth. "I never put myself in a position of taking whatever I could get," she states. But isn't that in fact what she is doing? She is taking customer money based on their belief that she has more power to deliver the goods than she really has at hand.
Did Maria do a "cost-benefit analysis" of her business, and her phony marketing, to determine if human happiness would be achieved by all involved - Maria, her family, and her customers?
Meanwhile, the definition of "deontology" (www.thefreedictionary.com) is "The science which relates to duty or moral obligation." Note, the definition begins with "the science," which takes deontological or deontology past a mere set of theories, and well into the realm of science.
Some helpful background into deontology, and this moral dilemma - and any morally confusing situation - may be found in The Philosophical Forum (Harvey, 2004). "Following [Immanuel] Kant, I assume that any deontological theory of ethics contains three sub-theories: 1) a theory of right action wherein acts are right or wrong independently of the consequences; 2) a theory or moral worth wherein the only acceptable motivating ethical concern is the intrinsic value of rightness itself, and 3) theory of the metaphysics of moral personhood wherein each moral agent bears intrinsic value and as such must be treated at all times with respect."
While examining the values (in the above paragraph) found in the writings of Immanuel Kant, it would seem quite appropriate to focus on an article relating Kant's "The Moral Law" (www.philosophypages.com),in which Kant states that "A good will is intrinsically good; its value is wholly self-contained and utterly independent of its external relations." From this perspective, can it be said that Maria had "good will" in her...
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