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Ethics Case Study Essay

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As tuition fees hike, one could sympathize with the average college student’s desire to find short cuts and cut costs. Students typically take advantage of promotional codes, coupons, or gift cards that would help subsidize their daily costs. Now, the next time a student is wiping his or her tears on a napkin over tuition increase, it begs the question, did the students purchase those napkins or just swiped them from a local restaurant? Two individuals who enters in similar financial situations a local fast food chain, however, one decides that he needs napkins for the rest of the week. The four normative ethic principles discussed in class: utilitarian, rights, justice-fairness, and virtue ethics can factor into the decision making process for this particular situation and evaluate whether or not it is ethical to take more napkins than necessary. Firstly, the normative ethics should undergo evaluation for this case individually, without biasness; moreover the four ethics should not have equal consideration for this situation. Utilitarianism ethics by definition is the best moral action that maximizes utility, and when considering utilitarian ethics, one must consider the costs and benefits of the action to the community. As described by Velasquez, the main problem stems from measurement problems. For the average student on the UCLA campus, he could use one napkin per meal and have three meals per day, totaling 90 napkins per month. A simple 250 pack of napkins is

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