Ethical Theories and Moral Reasoning

Introduction

Managers routinely face decisions in which commercial objectives conflict with duties to employees, customers, investors, communities, or the environment. A decision may increase profit while imposing hidden costs on vulnerable stakeholders; comply with the law while violating trust; or protect one group while disadvantaging another. Ethical theories provide structured ways to identify what matters morally, compare competing obligations, and justify action.

This chapter develops six influential approaches: utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, rights theory, theories of justice, and the ethics of care. These approaches are not mechanical substitutes for managerial judgment. Each highlights particular moral questions, offers distinctive strengths, and has characteristic limitations. Advanced ethical reasoning therefore requires comparison rather than automatic allegiance to one theory.

Learning Objectives

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

1. Explain the central claims and decision procedures of six ethical theories.
2. Distinguish consequences, duties, character, rights, justice, and relationships as moral considerations.
3. Apply the theories to competing managerial obligations.
4. Evaluate the strengths and limitations of theory-based reasoning.
5. Construct and defend an ethically justified managerial choice.

Why Ethical Theories Matter in Management

Ethical theories perform three related functions. First, they clarify the moral basis of a decision. A manager who says, “This is best because it produces the greatest overall benefit” is reasoning differently from a manager who says, “This must not be done because it violates a person’s right.” Second, theories expose neglected stakeholders and hidden assumptions. Third, they make decisions publicly defensible: employees, boards, regulators, and affected communities can assess the reasons offered.

A useful distinction is between descriptive and normative reasoning. Descriptive ethics examines what people or organizations believe and do. Normative ethics asks what they ought to do. This chapter concerns normative reasoning. It also distinguishes instrumental reasons, which concern business performance, from intrinsic moral reasons, which concern what is right or valuable in itself. Ethical management may produce reputation, trust, and resilience, but ethical action should not be reduced only to its financial benefits.

A practical analysis begins by identifying the decision, affected stakeholders, available alternatives, foreseeable effects, relevant duties and rights, and the values at stake. The manager should then test the alternatives through several theories, identify conflicts, and document a reasoned conclusion.

Utilitarianism: Evaluating Overall Consequences

Core idea

Utilitarianism judges an action by its consequences. The morally right action is generally the one that produces the greatest net balance of benefits over harms for all affected parties. Classical utilitarianism is associated especially with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Bentham emphasized the aggregation of pleasure and pain; Mill distinguished higher and lower forms of well-being and defended the importance of liberty and human development.

Utilitarian reasoning is impartial: each person’s welfare counts, and no stakeholder’s interests automatically receive greater moral weight merely because that stakeholder is powerful. In management, utilitarianism asks whether an action increases total welfare, reduces total harm, or produces the best expected outcome among feasible alternatives.

Act and rule utilitarianism

Act utilitarianism evaluates each individual action by its expected consequences. Rule utilitarianism evaluates rules by asking whether general acceptance of a rule would produce better outcomes. For example, an act-utilitarian manager might conceal a product defect if doing so appears to prevent immediate panic. A rule-utilitarian manager asks whether a general rule permitting concealment would undermine safety, trust, and social welfare. The latter analysis will usually reject concealment.

A managerial procedure

A practical utilitarian assessment can follow these steps:

1. Define the decision and realistic alternatives.
2. Identify all materially affected stakeholders, including indirect and future parties.
3. Estimate the significant benefits, harms, probabilities, duration, and distribution of effects.
4. Consider less harmful ways to obtain similar benefits.
5. Compare expected net outcomes and test whether vulnerable groups bear disproportionate risks.
6. Select the alternative with the strongest overall moral justification.

Utilitarianism does not require perfect numerical precision. In many business decisions, consequences are uncertain and benefits such as dignity or trust are difficult to monetize. A qualitative consequence matrix may therefore be more honest than invented monetary estimates.

Strengths and limitations

Utilitarianism encourages broad stakeholder consideration, attention to real-world effects, and efficient allocation of scarce resources. It is particularly useful in public policy, safety planning, disaster response, and cost-effectiveness analysis.

Its weaknesses are equally important. Aggregating welfare can permit serious harm to a minority if the majority gains enough. Forecasts may be biased, and managers may count measurable financial benefits more readily than dignity, cultural loss, or psychological harm. Utilitarian reasoning can also appear to justify deception, coercion, or rights violations when those actions produce attractive aggregate results. Rights and duties are therefore important constraints on consequence-based analysis.

Deontology: Duties, Rules, and Respect for Persons

Core idea

Deontological ethics evaluates actions primarily through duties, principles, and the moral status of the act itself rather than its consequences. Immanuel Kant’s influential formulation holds that rational persons must be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as means. A related test, the categorical imperative, asks whether the principle behind an action could be willed as a universal rule and whether the action respects the autonomy and dignity of persons.

A manager using deontological reasoning asks: What obligations apply? Is the action honest? Does it respect consent? Could the underlying principle be accepted consistently if everyone acted on it? Would the decision manipulate people or treat them merely as instruments?

Duties and moral rules

Duties may be negative, requiring managers not to cause certain harms, such as deception, coercion, discrimination, or theft. They may be positive, requiring action, such as keeping promises, correcting known hazards, protecting confidential information, or assisting those exposed to organizational risks. Some duties are role-based, arising from employment, professional standards, contracts, or fiduciary relationships; others are general duties owed to persons as such.

Deontology distinguishes a morally permissible action from a merely advantageous one. A company might disclose a defect even when disclosure threatens its market position because honesty and respect for customers are duties, not optional strategies.

Strengths and limitations

Deontology protects individuals from being sacrificed for aggregate benefits and provides clear boundaries for conduct. It supports professional integrity, truthful communication, informed consent, privacy, and fair treatment.

However, duties can conflict. A manager may owe confidentiality to an employee while also owing a duty to protect colleagues from a serious threat. Strict rules may produce hardship when unusual circumstances arise. Deontological reasoning must therefore clarify which duty is stronger, whether an exception is morally defensible, and how to minimize unavoidable harm without abandoning the underlying principle.

Virtue Ethics: Character and Practical Wisdom

Core idea

Virtue ethics, associated with Aristotle and later virtue theorists, asks not only “What should I do?” but also “What kind of person or organization should I become?” A virtue is a stable disposition to perceive and act well. Important managerial virtues include honesty, courage, justice, temperance, humility, empathy, reliability, and practical wisdom.

Virtue ethics links good character with human flourishing. Ethical conduct is not merely compliance with isolated rules; it is the expression of a well-formed character within a community. A virtuous manager develops judgment through experience, reflection, mentorship, and repeated action.

Practical wisdom

Practical wisdom—often called phronesis—is the capacity to judge what is appropriate in particular circumstances. It connects general values with concrete action. Courage, for example, is not reckless risk-taking or passive avoidance; it is the appropriate response to danger in light of the situation. Similarly, generosity requires judgment about what to give, to whom, and when.

Virtue ethics is especially useful when policies do not determine the answer. Consider a manager deciding whether to report a technically legal but exploitative supplier arrangement. The relevant question includes what an honest, fair, and responsible leader would do, what organizational character the choice expresses, and what habits it will cultivate.

Strengths and limitations

Virtue ethics captures moral motivation, leadership example, organizational culture, and the importance of judgment under uncertainty. It explains why two managers who follow the same rule may differ ethically: one may act from integrity, the other from fear or self-interest.

Its limitations include disagreement about which virtues matter and how they should be ranked. Virtue language can also become vague or culturally narrow. A leader’s personal reputation must not replace transparent procedures, rights protections, or accountability mechanisms.

Rights Theory: Protecting Claims and Human Dignity

Core idea

Rights theory holds that individuals possess justified claims or entitlements that impose duties on others. Rights may be legal, moral, human, civil, contractual, or property-related. A legal right derives from a recognized legal system; a moral or human right is justified by principles of human dignity even when law fails to recognize or protect it.

Rights are often described as negative or positive. Negative rights require noninterference—for example, freedom from coercion, unjust discrimination, or unauthorized surveillance. Positive rights require provision or assistance, such as access to agreed benefits or reasonable protection from known risks. The distinction is not absolute: protecting a negative right may require substantial institutional action.

Rights in management

Rights-based analysis asks whose rights are affected, what duties correspond to those rights, whether consent is informed and voluntary, and whether a proposed limitation is necessary and proportionate. Employees may have rights to safe working conditions, fair treatment, privacy within reasonable limits, and truthful information. Customers may have rights to safety, accurate product information, and meaningful choice. Communities may have rights-related claims concerning health, land, and environmental security.

Digital management makes rights analysis particularly important. Collecting employee data may improve security, but it can intrude on privacy. An AI recruitment system may increase efficiency, but applicants have interests in non-discrimination, explanation, and contestability. A rights-based approach requires more than asking whether the system improves average outcomes; it asks whether people are being subjected to unjustified interference or denied equal moral status.

Strengths and limitations

Rights theory gives strong protection to individuals and minorities and places boundaries around managerial discretion. It is valuable in privacy, labor relations, consumer protection, human rights, and technology governance.

Rights may conflict—for example, commercial confidentiality versus public interest disclosure. Rights also require interpretation: privacy is not absolute, and free expression does not automatically justify harassment. Resolution may require proportionality, procedural safeguards, and attention to the seriousness of the competing interests.

Justice: Fairness in Distribution, Procedure, and Recognition

Core idea

Justice concerns fair treatment. It asks how benefits, burdens, opportunities, risks, and decision-making power are distributed, and whether people are treated as equals in relevant respects. A just outcome is not always an identical outcome; relevant differences may justify differentiated treatment, while irrelevant differences must not be used to discriminate.

Forms of justice

Distributive justice concerns allocation. In organizations, it applies to pay, promotion, layoffs, bonuses, workload, safety risks, and access to development. Distribution may be based on equality, need, contribution, effort, seniority, or other morally relevant criteria. Managers must explain why a criterion is appropriate rather than assuming that one formula fits all contexts.

Procedural justice concerns the fairness of the process. Important features include consistent rules, impartial decision-makers, accurate information, opportunities to be heard, review or appeal, and transparent reasons. Employees may accept an unfavorable outcome more readily when the procedure is respectful and fair.

Interactional justice concerns the quality of interpersonal treatment—honesty, dignity, civility, and adequate explanation.

Corrective justice concerns repairing wrongful losses or harms. Compensation, remediation, apology, and institutional reform may all be relevant after misconduct.

Contemporary justice analysis also considers structural justice: whether rules that appear neutral reproduce historical disadvantage. For example, an algorithm trained on biased historical promotion data may systematically disadvantage a group even without explicit discriminatory intent.

Rawlsian reasoning

John Rawls proposed that principles of justice should be selected from an impartial position behind a veil of ignorance, where decision-makers do not know their future social position, wealth, gender, abilities, or organizational status. This thought experiment encourages principles that no one could reasonably reject if they might occupy the least advantaged position. Rawls also emphasized equal basic liberties and the fair equality of opportunity, alongside concern for the least advantaged.

The veil of ignorance is not a literal business procedure. It is a test for self-serving bias. A manager designing redundancy criteria, for example, should ask whether the criteria would seem acceptable if the manager did not know whether they would affect a senior executive, a temporary worker, a caregiver, or a disabled employee.

Strengths and limitations

Justice theory highlights distribution, power, institutional design, and fairness over time. It is indispensable for compensation, restructuring, equality, access, and algorithmic governance. Its difficulty lies in disagreement about what counts as fair and whether equality, need, contribution, or priority should dominate. Justice analysis should therefore make its allocation principles explicit and examine their effects on disadvantaged groups.

Ethics of Care: Relationships, Dependence, and Responsiveness

Core idea

The ethics of care emphasizes relationships, vulnerability, interdependence, empathy, and context. Associated with thinkers such as Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, and Joan Tronto, it developed partly as a critique of ethical models that portray moral agents as isolated, autonomous decision-makers. People depend on families, communities, institutions, and workplaces; ethical decisions must take those relationships seriously.

Care ethics asks: Who is vulnerable? What relationships of dependence exist? What responsibilities have arisen through trust or history? Who is listening, who is excluded, and what response would sustain or repair the relationship? Care is not simply kindness. It involves attentiveness to need, competent response, responsibility, and accountability.

Managerial application

A manager implementing a restructuring plan may have a duty to maintain viability, but care ethics requires attention to how employees experience uncertainty, whether communication is humane, and what support is offered to those losing employment. It may support flexible work for caregivers, individualized assistance for workers with disabilities, or dialogue with communities affected by closure.

Care does not mean always choosing the most sympathetic individual or abandoning impartial standards. Favoritism can itself be unjust. A mature care approach combines responsiveness to particular needs with transparent principles and safeguards against exploitation, burnout, and unequal emotional labor.

Strengths and limitations

Care ethics captures moral realities often missed by abstract cost-benefit calculations: trust, dependency, emotional harm, and the quality of relationships. It is valuable in leadership, human resources, health services, customer relations, and crisis management.

Its risks include partiality, inconsistency, paternalism, and the possibility that caring labor will be assigned disproportionately to women or lower-status workers. Care must therefore be linked to justice, rights, and organizational accountability.

Comparing the Theories

The theories illuminate different dimensions of the same decision.

These theories can be used sequentially. First, identify non-negotiable rights and duties. Second, assess consequences among permissible options. Third, test distribution and procedure. Fourth, consider character, relationships, and long-term organizational culture. This is not a universal algorithm; it is a disciplined pluralist method.

An Integrated Moral-Reasoning Framework

A defensible managerial analysis can use the following cycle:

1. Frame the issue. State the decision without disguising its moral stakes.
2. Gather facts. Separate verified information from assumptions and forecasts.
3. Map stakeholders. Include people with little power, indirect stakeholders, and future generations where relevant.
4. Identify obligations. List laws, contracts, professional duties, promises, rights, and organizational responsibilities.
5. Generate alternatives. Avoid a false choice between only two options; consider redesign, mitigation, delay, consultation, or compensation.
6. Apply the theories. Compare consequences, duties, character, rights, justice, and care.
7. Assess power and bias. Ask who defines the problem, who bears risk, and whether data or procedures are biased.
8. Decide and justify. Explain the reasons, trade-offs, safeguards, and residual harms.
9. Implement and review. Monitor effects, provide appeal, correct errors, and learn institutionally.

Ethical reasoning improves when decisions are documented. A decision record should identify alternatives considered, affected stakeholders, evidence used, dissenting concerns, mitigation measures, and review dates. Consultation is especially important where decisions affect vulnerable groups or involve automated systems.

Applied Case: Automated Hiring and Fair Opportunity

Background

Illustrative case. Meridian Services, a regional logistics company, introduces an AI recruitment tool to screen 40,000 annual applications. The vendor claims that the tool reduces recruitment time by 60 percent. After implementation, internal analysts discover that applicants from certain neighborhoods and applicants with career interruptions are rejected at significantly higher rates. The company has no evidence that the model intentionally discriminates, but historical hiring data used for training reflect years of managerial preferences.

Problem

The chief operating officer wants to continue using the tool because vacancies are costly and the vendor promises improved efficiency. The human resources director recommends suspension until an independent audit is completed. A disability advocacy group argues that applicants deserve an explanation and a meaningful opportunity to challenge automated decisions.

Analysis through the theories

A utilitarian analysis recognizes the benefits of faster recruitment, lower administrative cost, and potentially better staffing. It must also include false exclusions, lost opportunities, reputational damage, reduced diversity, and the social cost of reproducing disadvantage. Because the harms are concentrated and foreseeable, continuing unchanged is unlikely to maximize welfare. A less harmful alternative—temporary human review and model correction—may preserve much of the benefit.

Deontology asks whether applicants are being treated merely as data points and whether the company is honest about automation. If applicants are not told that automated screening is used, or cannot challenge material errors, the process may violate duties of transparency and respect. Efficiency does not excuse deception.

Rights theory focuses on equal treatment, privacy, and the right to meaningful consideration. Even where no jurisdiction creates a specific right to an explanation, the company has a strong moral reason to provide notice, accessible review, and protection against discriminatory exclusion.

Justice analysis examines both outcomes and procedure. Historical data encode structural disadvantage, so a neutral-looking model may generate unjust distributions. Procedural fairness requires validation, consistent criteria, human oversight, an appeal mechanism, and monitoring across relevant groups.

Virtue ethics asks what kind of organization Meridian is becoming. A responsible and humble company would acknowledge uncertainty, investigate criticism, and correct a system rather than defend it reflexively. Courage is required to pause a profitable tool when evidence of harm emerges.

Care ethics directs attention to applicants whose livelihoods depend on access to work and to the unequal burden of opaque rejection. It supports respectful communication and individualized review where automated classification is least reliable.

Approach and outcome

Meridian pauses automatic rejection, retains the tool only for administrative support, commissions an independent bias and validity audit, informs applicants about automated assessment, and creates human review for borderline or challenged cases. It removes proxy variables that lack job relevance, validates selection criteria against actual job performance, and publishes an internal fairness report. The company also establishes quarterly monitoring and a governance committee including HR, legal, data science, employee representatives, and external experts.

The revised process is slower than the original system but remains faster than fully manual recruitment. More importantly, it improves defensibility, reduces unjust exclusion, and makes accountability visible.

Learning points

1. Aggregate efficiency cannot by itself justify concentrated rights or justice harms.
2. Historical data are not morally neutral merely because they are numerical.
3. Human oversight must have authority to reverse automated outcomes.
4. Transparency, appeal, and monitoring are substantive ethical controls, not public-relations additions.
5. Theory comparison produces a stronger decision than relying on one metric or one principle.

Challenges and Limitations of Moral Reasoning

Ethical theories do not eliminate ambiguity. Facts may be incomplete, outcomes uncertain, and stakeholders may disagree about values. Managers may also face organizational pressure, conflicts of interest, retaliation risks, and limited time. A further danger is ethical fading, in which a moral issue is reframed only as a financial, operational, or legal problem.

Legal compliance is necessary but not sufficient. Law may establish a minimum standard, leave morally important issues unregulated, or permit unequal outcomes that remain ethically questionable. Conversely, managers should not treat personal preference as a universal moral principle. Good reasoning requires evidence, consistency, openness to challenge, and willingness to revise a decision when new information appears.

Pluralist reasoning can also become superficial if managers list theories without allowing them to affect the decision. Theories should generate concrete questions, identify reasons for and against each alternative, and lead to documented safeguards. Where disagreement remains, decision-makers should explain why one consideration was given priority and what protections will address the losing considerations.

Contemporary Implications for Managers

Digital platforms, AI, global supply chains, climate risks, and hybrid work make moral reasoning increasingly important. Technology can magnify both benefits and harms: a biased decision applied to thousands of people creates systemic consequences. Global operations create conflicts among local norms, corporate standards, human rights, and supply-chain responsibilities. Climate decisions raise questions of intergenerational justice because current benefits may impose future risks.

Best practice is to embed ethical reasoning in governance rather than leave it to individual heroism. Organizations should provide clear escalation channels, independent audit, stakeholder consultation, impact assessment, ethical training, protected dissent, and post-decision review. Boards and senior managers should ask not only whether a decision is legal and profitable, but also whether it respects persons, distributes risks fairly, sustains trustworthy relationships, and expresses the character the organization claims to possess.

Chapter Summary

Ethical theories provide complementary perspectives for managerial judgment. Utilitarianism evaluates overall benefits and harms but must guard against sacrificing minorities. Deontology emphasizes duties, universalizable principles, honesty, and respect for persons, though duties may conflict. Virtue ethics focuses on character, practical wisdom, and the kind of organization a decision creates. Rights theory protects legitimate claims such as dignity, privacy, safety, and equal treatment. Justice examines fair distribution, procedure, interaction, correction, and structural disadvantage. The ethics of care emphasizes vulnerability, dependence, relationships, attentiveness, and responsive support.

No single theory resolves every managerial dilemma. A strong approach identifies facts and stakeholders, recognizes rights and duties, compares consequences, tests fairness, considers character and relationships, and establishes safeguards and review. In the illustrative hiring case, this pluralist approach supported suspending harmful automation, improving transparency, preserving human appeal, and monitoring outcomes. Ethical management is therefore not merely choosing what is profitable or legal; it is the disciplined justification and responsible implementation of choices affecting human lives.

Key Terms

Utilitarianism: Ethical theory that evaluates actions by their overall consequences for welfare and harm.

Act utilitarianism: Assessment of each individual action by its expected consequences.

Rule utilitarianism: Assessment of rules by the consequences of their general acceptance.

Deontology: Ethical approach centered on duties, principles, and respect for persons.

Categorical imperative: Kantian test requiring principles to be universalizable and persons to be treated as ends.

Virtue ethics: Ethical approach focused on character, flourishing, and morally excellent action.

Practical wisdom: Context-sensitive judgment about how to act well in particular circumstances.

Rights theory: Approach that protects justified claims and entitlements held by individuals or groups.

Negative right: Right requiring others to refrain from unjustified interference.

Positive right: Right requiring provision, assistance, or protective action.

Justice: Fair treatment in the distribution of benefits, burdens, opportunities, and power.

Distributive justice: Fairness of outcomes and allocations.

Procedural justice: Fairness of decision-making processes.

Interactional justice: Respectful, honest, and dignified interpersonal treatment.

Corrective justice: Repair of wrongful loss or harm.

Ethics of care: Approach emphasizing relationships, vulnerability, dependence, and responsiveness.

Stakeholder: Person or group affected by, or able to affect, an organizational decision.

Ethical fading: Process by which moral dimensions disappear from managerial attention.

Moral pluralism: View that several distinct moral considerations may legitimately apply to one decision.

Review Questions

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the central moral question posed by utilitarianism?
2. How does deontology distinguish a duty from a desirable consequence?
3. What is practical wisdom in virtue ethics?
4. Distinguish distributive justice from procedural justice.
5. Why does the ethics of care emphasize vulnerability and relationships?

Long Answer Questions

1. Compare act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism, using a managerial example.
2. Explain how rights theory can constrain a decision that appears to maximize overall welfare.
3. Discuss the strengths and limitations of virtue ethics for organizational leadership.
4. Explain how Rawls’s veil of ignorance can be used to test workplace policies.
5. Develop an integrated framework for resolving a conflict between confidentiality and public safety.

Analytical / Application Questions

1. A company plans to close a profitable factory that employs most of a rural community. Analyze the decision using all six ethical theories and recommend safeguards.
2. An employer uses software that monitors keystrokes and screenshots on remote workers’ computers. Identify the relevant duties, rights, consequences, justice concerns, virtues, and care obligations.
3. A supplier offers substantially lower prices but has credible allegations of unsafe working conditions. Construct a theory-based recommendation and specify what evidence and remediation would be required before continuing the relationship.

Multiple Choice Questions with Answers

Question 1

Which question is most directly associated with utilitarian reasoning?

A. What action expresses the organization’s ideal character?

B. Which action produces the greatest overall balance of benefits over harms?

C. Which action follows a universal duty regardless of consequences?

D. Which action best preserves a particular relationship?

Correct Answer: B. Which action produces the greatest overall balance of benefits over harms?

Question 2

A manager refuses to conceal a product defect even though disclosure may reduce quarterly profit. Which theory most directly supports this decision through a duty of honesty?

A. Deontology

B. Act utilitarianism

C. Ethics of care

D. Virtue relativism

Correct Answer: A. Deontology

Question 3

What does practical wisdom mean in virtue ethics?

A. Applying one rule identically in every situation

B. Calculating every consequence in monetary terms

C. Judging how to act well in a particular context

D. Following the preference of the most powerful stakeholder

Correct Answer: C. Judging how to act well in a particular context

Question 4

Which example best illustrates procedural justice?

A. Giving every employee exactly the same salary

B. Providing an impartial hearing and an opportunity to appeal a dismissal

C. Maximizing total company profit

D. Choosing the most compassionate manager

Correct Answer: B. Providing an impartial hearing and an opportunity to appeal a dismissal

Question 5

A negative right primarily requires others to do what?

A. Provide a financial benefit

B. Offer individualized counseling

C. Refrain from unjustified interference

D. Guarantee an identical outcome

Correct Answer: C. Refrain from unjustified interference

Question 6

The ethics of care is especially concerned with which issue?

A. Relationships, vulnerability, and dependence

B. Universal rules considered independently of context

C. Aggregate welfare measured only by revenue

D. Share price as the sole measure of success

Correct Answer: A. Relationships, vulnerability, and dependence

Question 7

Why can an algorithm trained on historical promotion data raise a justice concern?

A. Numerical data are always invalid

B. Historical patterns may reproduce structural disadvantage

C. Algorithms cannot process business information

D. Justice requires eliminating all performance criteria

Correct Answer: B. Historical patterns may reproduce structural disadvantage

Question 8

Which action best reflects rule utilitarian reasoning?

A. Choosing the action that benefits the manager personally

B. Asking whether a general disclosure rule would improve trust and welfare

C. Ignoring consequences because rules never matter

D. Choosing the action that feels most caring

Correct Answer: B. Asking whether a general disclosure rule would improve trust and welfare

Question 9

In the illustrative hiring case, which safeguard most directly supports procedural fairness?

A. Automatic rejection of all borderline applicants

B. Removing all human judgment from recruitment

C. Providing human review and an opportunity to challenge a decision

D. Using only the vendor’s claims about accuracy

Correct Answer: C. Providing human review and an opportunity to challenge a decision

Question 10

Which statement best describes moral pluralism?

A. Only consequences can justify a managerial decision

B. Several distinct moral considerations may apply to the same decision

C. Ethical decisions are determined entirely by personal preference

D. Legal compliance automatically settles every ethical question

Correct Answer: B. Several distinct moral considerations may apply to the same decision