Your instructor will choose two incidents from the Short Incidents for Ethical Reasoning that follow Ch. 8 of your textbook. After reading each incident, you must identify all relevant stakeholders and determine how they could be impacted by the decision that will be made, identify and apply at least one principle for ethical reasoning, and then consider alternative courses of action and choose the best course of action based on stakeholder impacts and the outcome of the application of the ethical principle.

Your textbook defines stakeholders as an entity that is benefitted or burdened by the actions of a corporation or whose actions may benefit or burden the corporation. Some common examples of stakeholders would include customers, employees, suppliers, stockholders, and the community.

Businesses will almost always have multiple stakeholders, and many times their interests will conflict. This means that a business decision-maker will frequently have to make a decision in the face of competing claims from different stakeholders. The question of whose interests should be prioritized requires the exercise of judgment. This skill—examining competing claims and deciding which one is the strongest—is called evaluation. You will want to consider the power, urgency, and legitimacy that each stakeholder presents.

You should put yourselves in each stakeholder’s position—Why do they care about the outcome of the decision? How will they be affected? What outcome would they prefer? What are their arguments in support of their preferred outcome? You will want to consider the power, urgency, and legitimacy that each stakeholder presents.