According to Nicholas D. Smith in response to a question about sexual harassment legislation, "The minute someone in that place begins to give sexual attention to someone else in that workplace, the environment is changed--and changed in a way that makes the workplace no longer an entirely comfortable place to work." However the fact of the matter is that a great many people marry their coworkers and that studies show only a small percentage of those relationship were started by people who accidentally met up outside of work. If the purpose of sexual harassment legislation is to ban all interaction of a sexual nature between coworkers (since all sexual attention makes the workplace an uncomfortable place to work) then those marriages could not have occurred if sexual harassment law was 100% effective in achieving its supposed purpose. Since marriage is a highly regarded social institution isn't it highly unlikely that the purpose of sexual harassment legislation is to ban all sexual interaction between...

When someone is indicted for a crime, it's standard for newspaper reports to state that he only "allegedly" did whatever he is accused of doing. But suppose that the guilt of the defendant is extremely well confirmed (a thousand witnesses saw him, and we have an HD-quality recording of the incident). If the trial has yet to arrive at a verdict, should reporters still insist upon use of the "alleged" qualification? In other words, should standards of assertion in journalism be tied to standards of assertion in judicial proceedings?

Is it ethical for a pharmaceutical company to keep the results of a negative clinical trial secret? Patients participate in clinical trials of an investigational drug for many reasons. One of these reasons may be the desire to benefit society. If a pharmaceutical company keeps clinical trial results secret, society will not benefit. (Companies keep negative results secret because they want to avoid benefiting a competitor or simply because there is a cost to releasing the information.) There are many adverse consequences of the failure to make negative data public. For example, other companies may unwittingly conduct clinical trials on drugs that work by the same biological mechanism subjecting many people to risks without the possibility of benefit. In addition, the negative results represent important scientific information that may guide researchers to the development of drug strategies that do provide a positive benefit for patients. When pharmaceutical companies enroll patients in a clinical trial,...

What is the meaning of loyalty? If I work in an organization and am committed to its purpose but feel that the organization is not meeting its purpose or is perhaps subverting it, to what do I owe my loyalty? To those currently in the organization or to what I understand to be the purpose of the organization?

I have an ethical question about buying milk at the supermarket. Supermarkets will usually have many rows of bottles of milk on their shelves – with milk that has the soonest use-by date at the front of the shelf, and milk that has more distant use-by dates nearer the back. Clearly the supermarket would like people to take milk from the front, so that the bottles which will go bad sooner are bought before those which will stay good for longer, so that they are not left with unsaleable bad milk. However, as the shopper, I also have an interest in the milk that I buy staying good for as long as possible after I buy it. My question, therefore, is: is there anything unethical about my reaching to the back row for the milk that I will buy? On the one hand, it is out and easy to access (I'm not breaking in to the store room), but on the other hand, they clearly intend the rows to be deplenished from the front. – Many thanks for your answers!

Some businesses use incentive schemes to draw in customers; I want to know about whether or not such schemes abuse human psychology or are otherwise immoral. Let me give an example. Imagine a sandwich shop that sells sandwiches for 2$ each; they decide to change the scheme, so that now, every time one buys four sandwiches, the fifth sandwich comes free of charge. To compensate, they raise the price of the sandwiches to 2,50$, meaning that either way, the customers end up paying 10$ for every five sandwiches. Yet people, especially newcomers to the shop unfamiliar with the old prices, buy more sandwiches than before because, hey, there's a free sandwich in there! The shop begins to earn more than its competitors, and garners more long-term customers who pay more of their money for the sandwiches, by exploiting a loophole in human psychology. The sandwiches are in all relevant respects identical, yet people are paying more because of a freebie scheme. Is this an ethically legitimate practice? Or...

Ethics and Roofing My spouse and I live in a house whose roof who has been in place for 15-20 years of a purported life expectancy of 25 years. Recently we had large hail stones and strong winds that accompanied a nearby tornado. We have homeowner’s insurance that covers storm damage—a particular type that provides “full replacement value” for legitimate claims (which we pay for by an increased cost). The insurance company told me that damage caused by a storm is a legitimate claim, and that I should get an estimate and call them back. A roofer who looked at the roof estimates that the entire roof would need to be replaced at a cost of $7,000-10,000 (minus the deductible) It turns out that my spouse and I have different views of this situation. My position is that insurance represents an investment you make to protect yourself against major setbacks. The fact that the storm happened towards the end of the roof’s life-cycle is irrelevant My spouse, however, considers it unethical and even ...

I own a for-profit that provides a service. Unfortunately, due to financial constraints, I cannot provide this service charitably. Would it be unethical to create a 501c3 (non-profit foundation) arm to provide my service to underprivileged folks and hire my for-profit arm to conduct the event? Please note that, objectively, my for-profit arm is truly the most capable provider of this service in the area; also, the purpose of many foundations is precisely to hire vendors, not to direct events themselves. Thanks for your insights.

I have an ethical question. I own a business that provides services to corporations, both public and private. Today at lunch I was having a conversation with my business partner. He brought a proposal from a large public company's purchasing manager who had made it known to my business partner (since they were childhood friends) that he would give us this fairly substantial project if we offered him a kickback of 20% of the project cost, discreetly payable to him outside of the USA in cash. This purchasing manager would rubber-stamp approve our bid, even if it is high because we have to cover his kickback. I told my business partner that his friendly purchasing manager was not only doing something illegal, but also that he was unethical. I told him that we should not deal with such persons. My business partner posed this question to me - "How is this unethical? We routinely visit purchasing managers of other public companies and we take them and their key personnel out to lunch or to dinner to...

This is a question about philosophy of economic theory and the concept of property. Supposedly when I buy a stock what I am doing us buying a share of a corporation. In other words I supposedly "own" a part of the corporation. I have several objections to that claim. I did not buy the stock so that I could have voting rights in that corporation nor did I buy it for the trivial dividends the stock supplies. Those things have no value to me or most investors, and with few exceptions no one buys a stock because they have a desire to have voting rights in that company. Certainly if you are going to own a part of something what you own is going to be what makes that thing valuable and profit is what makes a company valuable and thus to own a company is to own a share in it's profit and stocks don't really give you that. Is there some deeper and non-arbitrary sense of the term "ownership" that sophisticated economic theory relies or is "ownership" a loose term?