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Choose one of the two topics. Formulate your answer, to the question presented in the topic you chose, in the form of a thesis. Advance your thesis in the introductory paragraph, explaining by what means you are going to demonstrate your case. In the following paragraphs, lay out the reasons to support of your answer. After displaying your argument, bring up an objection to one or more of the reasons you presented. That objection should also come in a form of a well-reasoned argument. That is to say, tell the reader (me) what is the main point of the objection and then present reasons for anyone to consider that objection seriously. Finally, rebuttal: reply to the objection, explaining why the reader should accept your reasoning despite the objection. Maximum number of words: 1200. Any quote, paraphrase or summary of external source (including the textbook and instructor’s notes) requires citation in text (name of the author, year of publication and, in case of a book or an article, page number), and a complete citation at the end of the essay. You can use APA, MLA, or Chicago style, so long as you use only one particular style. Reminder: using external sources without reference constitute plagiarism. Do not use Wikipedia as a source in your writing. Individual Essay Topic I Read the article on “H.B. Fuller and the Street Children of central America”: http://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/2468/2527609/case1.pdf Is H.B. Fuller morally responsible for the harm associated with the misuse of its glue? If not, is Fuller responsible for failing to prevent the harm associated with the misuse of its glue? Individual Essay Topic II “During the late 1990s, South African diamond producer De Beers and other companies in the diamond industry discovered that some of the diamonds they were buying and selling came from groups who used the proceeds to finance brutal civil wars. In Sierra Leone, rebels took control of diamond mines by systematically chopping off the arms and hands of as many as 20,000 children, women, and men until the diamond operations were turned over to them. Similar events took place in some other African countries. About 4 million civilians have died in the civil wars financed by the diamonds. Anxious to avoid a consumer boycott of “conflict diamonds”, De Beers and other diamond companies in 2000 formed the World Diamond Council, a group of buyers and sellers of diamonds that pledged to use the “Kimberley Process” to track diamonds from the mine to the jewelry shop to ensure that diamonds they sold were “conflict-free”. However, in 2004, Global Witness, a watchdog group, published a report of a survey it conducted which concluded that “83 percent of diamond companies surveyed are falling short on implementing the basic measures” of the 2000 agreement to keep conflict diamonds from getting mixed in with non-conflict diamonds.” (Velasquez, p. 86) Is it morally wrong for the retailers to buy diamonds if they cannot determine whether these diamonds are conflict free?

Richard DeGeorge, (Business Ethics, (2009)), notes some basic distinctions when talking about responsibility. The first of these is the distinction between causal responsibility and moral responsibility. If while you are driving your car, with due care and attention, a child suddenly darts out from between parked cars and you hit the child before you can apply the brakes, you are causally responsible for having hit the child. After all, you did hit the child.

The question of whether you are also morally responsible (i.e., blameworthy) for hitting the child is a separate question. If it was the case that you could not have stopped and that you were driving carefully in the first place, you aren’t morally responsible.

Causal responsibility is a component of moral responsibility, but it isn’t a sufficient condition for being morally responsibile. There are several other conditions needed to establish someone’s moral responsibility:

1. Someone committed the action that caused the harm.
2. Someone did so knowingly.
3. Someone did so willingly.

Conditions 1 through 3 amount to the idea that someone intentionally committed the action, that this someone was not forced to do it, that this someone had a choice, that this person knew what he or she was doing and did it deliberately. Since there are degrees of knowing and degrees of willing, moral responsibility also comes in degrees.

One can also be responsible for failing to prevent harm, but to be held responsible this failure must also be intentional, and also the product of a freely made choice.

If cases where full knowledge or sufficient freedom of choice is diminished, or altogether absent responsibility is said to be diminished or fully absent. These cases are to be recognized by the presence of excusing conditions and mitigating factors. These include:

1. Inability to act or to act otherwise.We cannot be held morally responsible for doing what is impossible for us to do. Nor can we be held fully responsible for doing what we are coerced into doing. In many cases it may be that the level of coercion is only severe enough to diminish responsibility, but not sufficiently severe to eliminate responsibility altogether. In such a case the difficulty of acting is a mitigating factor which merely diminishes responsibility.
2. Ignorance of the harm, either in the form of excusableignorance or invincible Lack of knowledge is excusable in individual cases if through no fault of our own you did not know the likely consequences of our actions, though perhaps such knowledge was available to some individuals, to experts, for instance. You are not excused from responsibility if you could have and should have known. The idea of what should be known corresponds to common knowledge or the knowledge possessed by or easily available to ‘the reasonable person’. Invincible ignorance, on the other hand, is ignorance we cannot overcome and for which we can’t be blamed. It differs from excusable ignorance insofar as invincible ignorance is ignorance of what is not yet known. For example, there was likely a time when the dangers of second hand smoke were not known or even suspected. Much the same may have been true of the dangers of drinking alcohol while pregnant. At present these dangers are widely appreciated and thus ignorance of them couldn’t be considered invincible evidence, but not known by the person in question. Invincible ignorance refers to the impossibility of anyone knowing at a given point in time. Excusable ignorance may be partial, in which case responsibility is diminished, but not eliminated. Thus non-negligent uncertainty is a mitigating factor.

Another important distinction regarding moral responsibility is the distinction between agent moral responsibility and role moral responsibility. Agent responsibility arises in circumstances where one person acts on behalf of another. DeGeorge himself uses the example of a lawyer acting as an agent for her client. The client has requested that the lawyer draw up a contract. The lawyer is acting on the wishes of the client; the content of the contract reflects the wishes of the client, not the wishes of the lawyer. DeGeorge stresses, however, that the lawyer still bears some responsibility for the contract. As DeGeorge puts the matter, “the lawyer has a moral responsibility for his actions, which he cannot dismiss simply because he acts as an agent for another. He cannot morally do what is immoral simply because he acts for another.”

Role responsibility is the responsibility that belongs to those who occupy a specifc role. As the occupant of that role there are certain duties that are theirs and theirs alone. Parents, for instance, have responsibilities toward their children which others do not. In their role as parents they can be held responsible for failing to carry out these duties. In the corporate world there are responsibilities that come with being a chief executive officer. These differ from the responsibilities of foreman on the factory floor. Failure to carry out these responsibilities can be viewed as moral failures, though not all employees have these same responsibilities. Only shop foremen do, or CEOs, or what have you. As DeGeorge puts the matter: “Typically a firm generates rules that are to govern the tasks done by the various members of the firm….In general, we can say that a person fulfills his moral obligtations to his employer by following the rules and carrying out the tasks that go with his role or position…. ‘I followed the rules’ or ‘I did what I was told’ are perfectly acceptable defenses for someone called to account for his actions in a rule governed position, unless the rule requires one to act immorally or if one is commanded to do what is immoral. For although each person has a moral obligationm to fulfill the tasks for which he is hired, the assumption must be that the task is not itself immoral.”

First read the preceding Context page for this Module. Then, read Milton Friedman’s famous essay entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”:   http://umich.edu/~thecore/doc/Friedman.pdf 

On the next page you will find two topics for the argumentative essay. Choose one of the topics. Read carefully the instructions regarding the required format of the essay. The information regarding moral responsibility is relevant for both topics.