Application of Ethical Theory
Business and Society. The work is to be 7 pages with three to five sources, with in-text citations and a reference page. With regards to the stakeholders within this specific case that has been listed, there are three. Firstly, there is Tom, the graphic artist working on a tight deadline at the heart of the ethical conflict. Tom represents that only individual within the case, who is faced with an ethical dilemma. The second shareholder is that of Nina, the Internet blogger whose content was unwittingly downloaded and copied by Tom in an attempt to meet the deadline he had with the supermarket chain. Lastly, the supermarket chain itself represents the third and final shareholder within this particular ethical case. Naturally, with regards to this particular case, the key ethical consideration at hand is whether or not Tom has acted ethically with relation to borrowing Nina’s content without permission and passing it off as his own in an effort to appease his distributor. The case is somewhat compounded and complicated by the fact that initially Tom wished to do the right thing and contacted Nina with regards to her permission to use aspects of her artwork in finalizing his own project. However, as the deadline loomed closer and closer and Tom did not have the wherewithal to finish the project under his own power, he was seemingly ‘forced’ to proceed on with Nina’s design without ever hearing back regarding her confirmation on his ability to borrow key aspects of her own ideas. The issue, therefore, extends well beyond legalities and whether or not Nina’s artwork exhibited on her blog was available to Tom under the fair use clause of the law. rather, ethically speaking, the question centres upon whether or not Tom had the ethical right to borrow Nina’s artwork without her confirmation, whether it was ethical of Tom to pass this artwork along unattributed, and the degree and extent to which he had a moral and ethical obligation to his employer to produce genuine and original work to fulfill the order (Cuilla 2011, p. 340). With regards to evaluating this case using two ethical theories that have thus far been discussed within the confines of this course, it is the belief of this student that the two ethical theories that best apply to the given case in point are those of the ethics of rights and postmodern ethics. With regards to the ethics of rights, one can see quite plainly and fairly readily that the ultimate issue at the heart of the matter is whether or not Tom has the right to the material that he has borrowed/stolen without the consent of the original artists. In this sense, the theory of rights denotes that the following questions must be answered if an ethical decision is to result: whose rights are at stake, what are the corresponding obligations, and how should these rights be ranked? With regards to the first one, the right of Nina, as well as the rights of the supermarket, are at stake. The rights of Nina relate, of course, to her right as the original artist to be secure in the fact that no one else is duplicating or passing off their own work as hers. .Similarly, the right of the supermarket relates to the fact that they have hired a contract worker, Tom in this case, to complete an original design to be featured on a new product line that they will proceed to market.
