Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Course Type: CORE VALUE
Course Code: VAL501
Course Name: Ethics
COURSE SYLLABUS
Students please note that this is core value course. All students must undertake this Calwest courses ($250 per
course) via Tube classes. Students may have undertaken similar course in another accredited university; but must
still complete this course at Calwest. There will be no Recognized Prior Learning (RPL) for this course.
1. Introduction
In all parts of the world, and especially America, there are “rags to riches” stories about the energetic and
dedicated hero who worked hard and made it big. Hard work and a little luck were all that was required.
Oddly, alongside that belief was another contradictory one that anyone who was or became rich must have
become so by unethical activity and behavior.
There is now a growing consensus that ethics has a role to play in business, the public view of business is
still expressed in what can be called the Myth of Amoral Business.
The Myth of Amoral Business expresses the ambivalence of many toward business and a popular,
widespread view of worldwide business. The myth describes how many businesses and businessmen and
businesswomen perceive themselves and are perceived by others: Business is concerned primarily with
profit. To earn a profit, a business produces goods or provides services and engages in buying and selling.
According to the myth, however, businesses and people in business are not explicitly concerned with ethics.
They are not unethical or immoral; rather, they are amoral insofar as they feel that ethical considerations
are inappropriate in business. What is the true relation of ethics and business, which is only slowly
emerging? What are the indications of its emergence? This is the foundation of this CORE VALUES course.
2. Course Objectives
The objectives of the course are to study ethics, both descriptive ethics (how the world is) and normative
ethics (how the world should be) from a business perspective.
Descriptive ethics is closely related to anthropology, sociology, and psychology and leans heavily on them.
This course consists of studying and describing the morality of a people, culture, or society. It compares and
contrasts different moral systems, codes, practices, beliefs, principles, and values. It provides basic material
that normative ethics must account for, and it provides a touchstone of the considered morality of a people
or society with which the normative theory must more or less coalesce. Normative ethics builds on the
whole that descriptive ethics provides and attempts to supply and justify a coherent moral system based on
it. As such, the course attempts to form into a related whole the various norms, rules, and values of a
society’s morality. It tries to render these as consistent and coherent as possible, with perhaps some
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hierarchical arrangement of norms. It attempts to find the basic principles from which the particular norms
can be derived. It attempts, in a variety of ways, to justify the basic principle of morality. It attempts to
provide a procedure by which conflicting norms can be adjudicated and particular cases decided.
Business ethics can help students approach moral problems in business more systematically and with better
tools than they might otherwise use. The course can help them to see issues they might typically ignore. It
can also impel them to make changes they might otherwise not be moved to make. But business ethics will
not, in and of itself, make anyone moral. Business ethics, as is true of ethics in general, presupposes that
those who study it already are moral beings, that they know right from wrong, and that they wish to be
even better, more thoughtful, and more informed moral beings. Business ethics will not change business
practices unless those engaged in the practices that need moral change wish to change them. Business
ethics can produce arguments showing that a practice is immoral, but obviously, only those in a position to
implement the changes will be able to bring them about. Business ethics is a field with practical import, but
it is up to those who study it to put what they learn into practice.
3. Prescribed Reading (Compulsory)
Richard T DeGeorge, Business Ethics (Latest Edition), Pearson, New Jersey, USA.
http://www.pearsoned.com/
4. Student Resource Requirements
• PC: A reliable computer running Windows XP or higher with 500 MB of RAM or higher
• Mac: A reliable computer running Mac OS 10 or higher
• Reliable high speed Internet connection (minimum 768 Kbps/128 Kbps)
• Web browser with Adobe Flash Player installed (Flash Player 10 or higher recommended)
5. Topic Outline
Topic Topic and Topic PowerPoint
No.
1 Ethics and Business
2 Conventional Morality and Ethical Relativism
3 Utility and Utilitarianism
4 Moral Duty, Rights, and Justice
5 Virtue Ethics and Moral Reasoning
6 Moral Responsibility: Individual and Corporate
7 The International Business System, Globalization, and Multinational Corporations
8 Corporations, Morality, and Corporate Social Responsibility
9 Corporate Governance, Disclosure, and Executive Compensation
10 Whistle‐Blowing
11 The Information Age: Property and New Technologies
12 Information, Computers, the Internet, and Business
13 The New Moral Imperative for Business
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6. Assessment
There will be Continuous Assessments done throughout this course. All topics will have a Topic Quiz that
needs to be satisfactorily answered prior to being allowed to access the next topic in the course. You are
allowed unlimited attempts in each Topic Quiz, so that you can master the topic before proceeding to the
next. After completing all Topics (and Quizzes) your Final Assessment will be available for you to undertake
online. There will be a time limit of 90 minutes for the final assessment in which you will need to answer 80
multiple‐choice questions that will be randomly selected from the questions asked in the topic quizzes.
Please ensure that you have an undisturbed 90 minute time frame to undertake your Final Assessment;
as after 90 minutes your work will be automatically submitted and graded.
There will be only one attempt provided for the Final Assessment.
The Final Assessment will form the over 80% of the weight given to your final course grade.
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