David Lemuel E. Garcia                                                                                         02/19/08

10564721      BS-IM

Working Ethics:

Strategies for Decision Making

And Organizational Responsibility

By Marvin T. Brown

Chapter 1: Confronting Ethical Concerns of Organizations

“For differences to become productive, participants need to overcome any tendency to become defensive and avoid conflict and need to become mutually engaged in an open inquiry into the materials that all members contribute to the discussion.”

            - In this quotation, the point would be is that, everyone should be open for the changes, accept and understand each and every insight that the diversion has with one another. If someone would want to give out a suggestion and he/she is not within the same context as you are, you should learn how to listen and understand your differences and then create a harmonious connection between your differences and come up with a better type of decision or any other thing.

Summary of the Chapter:

                        It only talked about the different processes of ethical reflections, how to do it, how to make good use of it, how to understand and benefit from it, what are the ethics of a system, and how to analyze different types of assumptions. It relies on the basic assumption that people can discuss what should be done in an organization.

Chapter 2: Developing an Ethical Perspective

                        “Words can become separated from their original outlook on the world, and people can employ them freely.”

            - For every word that we release in our mouths, others think of it differently or consider what we say in a different manner. Sometimes, we have our own words and we use it in such a way that we know how to use it then we’ll be shocked that there are offended people out there. That would be the problem in using something and not clarifying what are your intentions of saying such a word. Perspective can be different from one person to another so are words that can be perceived in many different ways.

Summary of the Chapter:

            The difference of behavior and actions is the main focus of this chapter and the emphasis that ethics focuses more on actions than behavior, the justification of ethics when it comes to action and not explaining behavior. It also talks about the gap between “ought” and “is”, the persons as moral agents, the organization as moral communities, and organizations as moral agents.

Chapter 3: Discovering the Right Decision

                        “Disagreement about our assumptions may be the most difficult to resolve because it signals different orientations toward the self, others, and the world.”           

            - Having someone disagree on you is hard especially with our assumptions because we come from different views and approaches therefore sometimes; bigger conflicts arise by just disagreeing to something. On the other hand, it gives us a different view and orients us with new things about the certain situation or event. It does educate us but arguments would arise before we could possibly see the better side of these arguments and disagreements from others.

Summary of the Chapter:

            Chapter 3 focuses more on the Five Resources for Making Decisions, and these are People’s policy proposals, their observations, their value judgments, their basic assumptions, and the opposing views. The criteria’s for evaluating these resources, the uses of the resources in coordination with decision making, the logics of ethical reflection, why should corporate constituencies have a voice in corporate policies, and the ethical reflection as argumentative analysis.