ETHICAL APPROACHES
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JUSTICE
ETHICS OF CARE
RIGHTS
UTILITARIANISM
JUSTICE
JUSTICE
• Justice is the ideal, morally correct state of
things and persons.
• It is based on individual moral rights.
• Justice can be handled in three
subcategories which are distributive
justice, retributive justice, and
compensatory justice.
JUSTICE
JUSTICE
DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
COMPENSATORY JUSTICE
DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
• It is interested in the fair distribution of
society’s benefits and burdens.
• The main principle of distributive justice is;
“If individuals are similar in the relevant
aspects, they should be given similar
benefits and burdens; if they are not, they
should be treated dissimilarly in proportion
to their dissimilarity.”
DISTRIBUTICE JUSTICE VİEWS
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Justice as Equality: Egalitarianism
Justice Based on Contribution: Capitalist Justice
Justice Based on Needs and Abilities: Socialism
Justice as Freedom: Libertarianism
Justice as Fairness: Rawls
Justice as Equality: Egalitarianism
• Each individual in the society or group
should be given exactly the equal shares
of benefits and burdens.
• There are objections to this view claiming
that people do not have the same degree
in a single aspect and some
characteristics are disregarded like need,
ability, and effort.
Justice Based on Contribution:
Capitalist Justice
• What should be the basis of an individual’s
share of benefits must be the contribution
to the society or group.
• Work effort, productivity, and market
forces of supply and demand are the
terms argued by critics to measure the
value of contribution.
Justice Based on Needs and Abilities:
Socialism
• People’s abilities should be the determiner of
work burdens and their needs should be the
determiner of benefits.
• Potential, which is a value, can only be realized
by exercising ability so burdens should be
distributed considering abilities.
• There is an opposing argument claiming that if
needs, not effort, determine benefits, there will
be no motivation to strive which will decline
productivity in return.
Justice as Freedom: Libertarianism
• Free individual choices are the cornerstone of
the libertarian view of justice according to Robert
Nozick, a famous libertarian.
• Freedom from coercion is the right of every
individual. If an individual is forced to do
something, it is unjust.
• This argument completely disregards people
needs counting freedom from coercion supreme
over anything.
Justice as Fairness: Rawls
• According to John Rawls, two principles should be used
to distribute the benefits and burdens of a society justly.
• First principle, called as principle of equal liberty, states
that each individual has a right to protect his/her liberties
from invasion by others.
• Second principle consists of two parts. First part, called
as difference principle, says that although there will be
inequalities in the society, most needy people should be
given special importance unless this causes everyone
get worse than before. Second part, called as principle of
fair equality of opportunity, argues that every individual
be given an equal opportunity to qualify for the more
privileged positions in society’s institutions.
RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
• All, and only, guilty people deserve
appropriate punishment.
• In order to maintain justice while punishing
the person, some criteria should be taken
into account. First, ignorant or unable
people should not be punished. Second,
there must be evidence of guilt. Finally,
punishment system must be consistent
and proportionate
COMPENSATORY JUSTICE
• It deals with just offsetting the loss of a
person who is wronged by others.
• The rationale behind this theory is that the
person who damages someone else by
doing a wrong must compensate that
person’s loss.
ETHICS OF CARE
ETHICS OF CARE
• People have an obligation to exercise special
care toward those particular persons with whom
we have worthy close relationships. This theory
is known as “ethics of care”.
• Feminist ethicists, Carol Gilligan mostly, have
developed this theory. They claim that women
approach ethical issues from a nonindividualistic
focus on relationships and caring.
ETHICS OF CARE
• Sometimes care and justice contradicts
with each other.
RIGHTS
RIGHTS
• A right is an individual’s entitlement to
something.
• If this entitlement may be derived from a
legal system that allows the person to
behave in a certain way, it is called a legal
right.
• Rights can also be the consequences of
moral standards. In this case, they are
called as moral rights or human rights.
RIGHTS
• Rights can be understood in several ways.
They can be interpreted as absence of
prohibitions, authority, or existence of
prohibitions.
RIGHTS
• MORAL RIGHTS
– They are tightly correlated with duties
because what is one’s right is another’s duty.
– Moral rights enable individuals in the free
trace of their interests.
– Moral rights constitute a basis for justifying
one’s actions and for invoking the protection
or assistance of others
THE BASIS OF RIGHTS
• Utilitarians argue that moral rights exist
because their existence maximizes utility.
However, right is an entitlement and it
should be regardless of utility
maximization so there should be another
source of moral rights
THE BASIS OF RIGHTS
• Immanuel Kant (Categorical Imperative)
• Everyone has a moral right to such
treatment and everyone has again the
correlative duty to treat others in this way.
KANT’S CATEGORICAL
IMPERATIVE
1) An action is morally right for a person if
that person is absolutely sure that s/he
will approve the same action of another
person.
2) An action is morally right if a person does
not use other people as means to attain
his/her interest but respects them.
UTILITARIANISM
UTILITARIANISM
• Utilitarianism is a general term which
argues that actions and policies should be
evaluated on the basis of the benefits and
costs they will have on society.
• Correct action is the one producing the
greatest net benefits or lowest net costs.
UTILITARIANISM
• Utilitarian approach requires a three-step
process.
– List the alternative actions to be applied in a
certain situation
– Measure all costs and benefits of all
alternatives
– Subtract the benefits from the costs and find
the action with the net greatest benefits or net
lowest costs
UTILITARIANISM
• The net greatest benefit for all people
affected by the action, not just the person
doing the action
UTILITARIANISM
• Utilitarianism has its origins in the works of
the Greek philosopher Epicurus, but as a
specific school of thought, it was originally
proposed by Jeremy Bentham.
• From the principle of utility, Bentham found
pain and pleasure to be the only intrinsic
values in the world: "nature has put man
under the governance of two sovereign
masters: pleasure and pain."
UTILITARIANISM
• Some critics argue that it contradicts with
both justice and rights.
• They say that while maximizing the gain of
society in an action, they engage in unjust
actions or they violate some people’s
rights.
• Utilitarians have developed an alternative
version of utilitarianism, which is ruleutilitarianism.
RULE-UTILITARIANISM
• The theory of rule-utilitarian is composed
of two principles.
– An action is ethically right if and only if it
would be required by correct moral rules.
– A moral rule is correct if and only if the sum
total of utilities produced if everybody to follow
that rule is greater than the sum total utilities
produced if everyone to follow some
alternative rule.
UTILITARIANISM
• It targets the net greatest benefit for all
people affected from the action.
• People affected from this action have a
stake in this decision. In other words, they
are the stakeholders of this action.
• Enterprises should not disregard this
approach in their businesses in today’s
highly competitive world.
Niccolò Machiavelli 1469-1527
An Italian politician philosopher best
known for his work "The Prince” detailing
his theory of government and maxims of
practical statecraft suggesting certain
principles of conduct specifically: cunning,
duplicity, or bad faith.
The main theme of this short book is that
all means may be resorted to for the
establishment and preservation of
authority and that the worst and most
unethical and unreliable acts of the ruler
are justified by the wickedness of the
governed. Machiavelli principles have
more to do with the efficient management
of government, making management and
control priority over morality
WHAT IS ETHICAL CODE?
• Ethic codes is the total of behavior principles
specific to each organization. These principles
help employees understand, what these rules
are, in what way they affect their behaviors, what
kind of sanctions there are if they do not obey
these rules
• Ethic codes provide a framework for employees
to approach work life and organizational
functioning with a pragmatic view.
HOW IS ETHICAL CODE
DEVELOPED?
Developing ethical code, it will be helpful
to apply a democratic and participative
method and to make code prepared by a
committee selected through election.
The ethical program to ensure that ethical
behaviors are implemented in an
organization is composed of the 12 steps.
1.Vision Statement
2.Values Statement
3.Organizational Ethic Principles
4.Ethic Officials
5.Ethic Committees
6.Ethic Communication Strategy
7.Ethic Education
8.Ethic Help Line
9.Assessment and Awarding
10.Supervision and Monitoring
11. Performance Measurement
12.Ethic Leadership
HOW IS ETHICAL CODE
IMPLEMENTED?
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The contribution of organization
Motivation
Communication
Associating culture with ethics