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Essay on Business Ethics

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Business Ethics

Corporate fraud has grabbed national headlines repeatedly in the last year. Although, Enron and World Com are two of the highest profile cases of corporate scam, ethics in the business world are generally deplorable. One of the most morally reprehensible cases to hit the newspapers in the past several years is that of Robert R. Courtney. His sense of business and personal ethics reflects moral depravity at its darkest moment. What he did was evil on both a business and certainly on a personal level. As a pharmacist, he was entrusted by patients, oncologists, and major drug companies, to fill prescriptions for cancer patients. He defied and denied this trust. Apparently he owed the IRS $600,000, and ironically …show more content…

Courtney violated this theory. What he did in essence was to cruelly twist the theory of utilitarianism by delivering the greatest harm to the most people he could. He had it turned around and was apparently not concerned with how his greedy, short-sighted , and immoral behavior was affecting others. Although this theory gives latitude to individual definitions of “good”, Courtney ‘s manipulation of good and evil, right and wrong could not be justified on any level.

Immanuel Kant posed a different framework from which ethics evolve. He supposed that actions spring from a person’s sense of duty. Is it possible Robert Courtney felt his duty to the IRS and to his local church was more important than his professional duty to dying cancer patients? Courtney’s duty as pharmacist should have prevailed and kept him from doing what he did. Both teleological and deontological theories emphasize dignity and respect. Robert Courtney violated each of these theories. In the beginning, regardless of his actions being accidental or deliberate, the pharmacist must have contemplated his own sensibilities and moral convictions. Supposing that Robert R. Courtney had never developed any moral character, rules governing pharmacists’ behavior prohibit what he did. It was his duty to take these rules into account and abide by them, when in fact Courtney did the exact opposite. He defied personal and professional

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