Ethics and the Gender Equality Dilemma for U.S. Multinationals ...

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Ethics and the Gender Equality Dilemma for U.S. Multinationals
 
  What would be an ideal claim and supporting arguments?

Question 2

The Social Responsibility Of Business Is To Increase Its Profits
 
  What would be a claim and supporting claims on the statement.

[alvinum]

Answer to Question 1

With regard to issues of gender equality, multinationals can avoid both the dangers of ethnocentrism, i.e. insisting on domestic codes of conduct in a foreign setting, and cultural relativism, i.e. deferring entirely to practices of societies in which they find themselves operating, by endorsing the concept of minimum universal principles.

• Compliance with U.S. law on matters of gender equality is unrealistic in many foreign countries because of their laws and customs.

• Simply adopting the practices of the society in which multinationals find themselves operating would lead not only to accepting morally suspect practices, but to handicapping women employees inasmuch as they are denied certain career and employment opportunities in foreign countries.

• Adopting the concept of minimum universal principles with regard to gender equality provides a means to critique foreign business cultures within which multinationals operate, without insisting those cultures simply mirror U.S. practice.

Answer to Question 2

The social responsibility of business is to maximize profit within the rules of the game, i.e. without deception or fraud.

• The corporate executive acts as an agent not as a principal, i.e. s/he acts in the interests of the shareholders.
  The sole goal of the shareholders is to maximize morally permissible profits.
  Therefore the corporate executive who pursues goals other than maximizing profits is imposing unauthorized taxes on shareholders.
  
  


• Corporate executives have no democratic mandate to implement social policy.
  In the absence of a democratic mandate the imposition of social policy is morally unjustified.
  Corporate executives are morally unjustified in implementing social policy.
  
  


• Many actions motivated by profit further social good.
  If the primary motive of an action is to maximize profit it is a mistake to describe its motivation to be the furthering of social good.
  It is therefore a mistake to describe the self-interested actions of corporations which happen to further social good as instances of social responsibility.