Ethical Decision-Making: Labor and Production Dilemmas

Labor and production standards, meant to ensure the safety of workers and consumers, are neither universally accepted nor always enforced. Where local governments fail to act, global corporations may receive pressure to step in. In this course, you will consider ethical questions about the role of international businesses in preventing harm abroad. Should international retailers require their foreign suppliers to pay workers a living wage? Should products that are banned domestically be exported for sale? Using conceptual tools for ethical analysis, you will consider case studies about sweatshops, pesticides, the sale of bodily organs, and clinical trials. The transferrable frameworks you will learn can be applied to ethical questions in a variety of contexts.

• Identify the different codes used for upholding labor standards.
• Apply rules- and results-based approaches in relation to worker rights as well as product safety and quality measures.
• Utilize a connection continuum to understand how global corporate responsibilities may be based on their capability to act rather than exclusively on a causation link to abuses.
• Analyze the spectrum of demand-side vs. supply-side responsibility through the lens of "degree of responsibility" factors.