Week 5 Discussion — Should the Plant Automate? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Hook

Some business choices are legal and still hard to call right, and some pit the owners against the people a choice touches. This week you learned that the law sets a minimum and ethics asks what is right beyond it, that Carroll's pyramid puts economic and legal responsibility beneath ethical and philanthropic responsibility, and that the shareholder position, Friedman (1970), and the stakeholder position, Freeman (1984), answer differently what a corporation is for. None of those ideas decides a real choice for you.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: An illustrative appliance-parts plant in a small town has 120 employees. Automating one line would eliminate 40 positions, and the plant would retrain 15 of those workers for maintenance roles, so it would have 25 fewer positions, 95 employees instead of 120. Should the plant automate the line? Take a side, argue it from the shareholder position or the stakeholder position, name the stakeholders by role who gain and who give something up, and state the strongest case from the other position.

Option B: An illustrative neighborhood bike shop learns that a brake pad it fitted on about 80 bikes wears out early, and in this case no rule requires it to warn past buyers. Calling every rider would cost the staff a few days of work. Should the shop call its past buyers? Run the three ethical-reasoning questions, name the stakeholders who gain and who give something up, and state the strongest case for the choice you did not make.

There is no single right answer. Two people can agree on every count in the case and still choose differently, because the choice rests on how they weigh owners, workers, customers, and the town. The course gives no verdict on the shareholder and stakeholder positions, and this is a judgment about an illustrative case, not legal advice for any real workplace. Pick the option you actually care about, and make your case.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, say whether the plant should automate the line, argue it from the shareholder position or the stakeholder position, and name the stakeholders by role who gain and who give something up; for Option B, say whether the shop should call its past buyers, run the three ethical-reasoning questions, and name who gains and who gives something up.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (ethics, legality, shareholder position, stakeholder position, net change in positions) correctly.
• State the strongest case for a view you do not hold, in one or two sentences.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: name a stakeholder the poster left out, show where a post treats "legal" as "ethical" or states the shareholder position without its limits, or make the strongest fair case for the choice the poster rejected. "Good post!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option B and think the shop should call its past buyers. Staying quiet is legal in this case, but that settles only the first of the three questions. The riders carry a risk they cannot see, and the shop chose the part, so fairness points toward calling. The staff give something up, a few days of work. The strongest case for staying quiet is that the pads may still work for a while and the shop's time is limited. That is a judgment about fairness versus cost, not a disagreement about the facts.

Notice how it names specific groups, says who gains and who gives something up, and states a fair case for the other side without calling it wrong. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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