Week 5 — What the Business Owes: Ethics & Social Responsibility

Welcome to your Week 5 Start Here page.

Why this matters

Whether you cook in a hospital kitchen or work a factory line, you will meet choices that are legal and still raise the question of whether they are right.

In plain language

Some business choices are perfectly legal and still feel wrong, and this week gives you words and tools for that gap. Business ethics (the standards of right and wrong behind business choices) asks what is right, while the law only sets the lowest bar. Corporate social responsibility (what a business owes the society around it) turns out to cover far more than giving to charity. Then you meet an old argument: is a corporation (a business the law treats as a person of its own) run for its owners, or for everyone its choices touch? By the end you can lay out both answers fairly, with an illustrative factory's decision in front of you.

• Already covered: Week 4, Choosing a Legal Form, explained corporations and stockholders.
• This week: ethics versus legality, CSR, and a corporation's purpose.
• How they connect: you now know who owns a corporation, so you can ask whom it serves.
• Where we're going next: Week 6, Making the Product.

Focus

What does a business owe beyond what the law requires, and whom should it be run for?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] tell an ethical question from a legal one
• [ ] sort actions into the levels of Carroll's pyramid
• [ ] state both positions on a corporation's purpose fairly
• [ ] compute the plant's net change in positions

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 5 (about 35 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Business Case Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: find the plant's net change in positions and argue the decision from both positions.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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