Course Information
| Instructor | Professor David Emmanuel Gray |
| Contact | CMUQ 1039, degray@cmu.edu, @ProfessorDEG |
| Office hours | By appointment, or whenever the instructor’s office door is open |
| Class time | Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30am–10:20am |
| Class location | CMUQ 1213 |
| Syllabus | PDF. |
| #BSE17. | |
| Assistants | Fatema Alsayed, fks@andrew.cmu.edu, @fatemaks |
| Amnah Ameen, aameen@andrew.cmu.edu, @amnah_ameen |
Grading
- Participation
Twitter assignment. - Class Summaries
Assignment.
Verbal: sample rubric (explanation).
Written: sample rubric (explanation), general technical requirements, and MS-Word template. - 4 Unit Exams
Lowest unit exam is dropped. - Final Exam
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15% |
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10% |
| 50% | |
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25% |
Grade Calculator (Excel)
Schedule
| Date | Topic/Readings | Assignments |
|---|---|---|
| 8/20 (Sun) | Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (Unit #1) (slides) | |
| 8/22 (Tue) | Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Questions. Rachels & Rachels, “What Is Morality?” Optional: Lin, “The Ethical Dilemma of Self-Driving Cars”. |
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| 8/24 (Thu) | Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Questions. Rachels & Rachels, “Subjectivism in Ethics”. |
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| 8/27 (Sun) | Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Questions. Weinstein, “If It’s Legal, It’s Ethical... Right?” Optional: Cannon, “Tylenol’s Rebound”. |
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| 8/29 (Tue) | Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Questions. Donaldson, “Values in Tension: Ethics Away from Home”. Optional: Zoepf, “Shopgirls”. |
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| 8/31 (Thu) | ⛰ Day of Arafat 🙇📿🙏⛰ | |
| 9/3–7 | 🌴 Eid Al-Adha Break 🔪🐐🎁🌴 | |
| 9/10 (Sun) | Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Questions. Case Study: “Vodafone Qatar’s Amazon Adventurers”. |
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| 9/12 (Tue) | Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Questions. Carr, “Is Business Bluffng Ethical?” |
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| 9/14 (Thu) | Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Questions. Crisp, “Persuasive Advertising, Autonomy, and the Creation of Desire”. 60 Minutes, “Undercover Marketing” (mp4). Optional: Poppick, “10 Subliminal Retail Tricks You’re Probably Falling For”. Optional: Vranica, “Sony Ericsson Campaign Uses Actors To Push Camera-Phone in Real Life”. |
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| 9/17 (Sun) | Unit #1 exam. | |
| 9/19 (Tue) | What’s the Point of Business? (Unit #2) (slides) Reading Questions. Rand, Atlas Shrugged. |
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| 9/21 (Thu) | What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Questions. Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”. Optional: Heracleous & Lan, “The Myth of Shareholder Capitalism”. |
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| 9/24 (Sun) | What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Questions. Parramore, “How a Libertarian Used Ayn Rand’s Crazy Philosophy to Drive Sears Into the Ground”. Rachels & Rachels, “The Argument That Ethical Egoism is Unacceptably Arbitrary”. |
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| 9/26 (Tue) |
What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Questions. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”. |
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| 9/28 (Thu) | What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Questions. Solomon, A Better Way to Think About Business. |
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| 10/1 (Sun) | What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Questions. Duska, “The Why’s of Business Revisited”. |
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| 10/3 (Tue) | What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Questions. Freeman, “Managing for Stakeholders”. |
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| 10/5 (Thu) | What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Questions. Case Study: “Building Construction and Safety After the Villaggio Fire”. |
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| 10/8 (Sun) | Unit #2 exam. | |
| 10/10 (Tue) | Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (Unit#3) (slides) Reading Questions. Moriarty, “Do CEOs Get Paid Too Much?” Optional: Mishel & Davis, “Top CEOs Make 300 Times More than Typical Workers”. |
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| 10/12 (Thu) | Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Questions. Epstein, “In Defense of the Contract at Will”. |
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| 10/15 (Sun) | Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Questions. McCall, “A Defense of Just Cause Dismissal Rules”. |
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| 10/17 (Tue) | Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Questions. Maitland, “The Great Non-Debate Over International Sweatshops”. |
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| 10/19 (Thu) | Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Questions. Meyers, “Wrongful Beneficence: Exploitation and Third World Sweatshops”. |
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| 10/22 (Sun) | Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Questions. Geva, “Moral Problems of Employing Foreign Workers”. |
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| 10/24 (Tue) | Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Questions. Case Study: “Reforming Qatar’s Kafala System”. |
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| 10/26 (Thu) | Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Questions. Zwolinski, “The Ethics of Price Gouging”. Optional: Evans, “Uber’s Snow Storm Surge Pricing Gouged New Yorkers Big Time”. |
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| 10/29 (Sun) | Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Questions. Snyder, “What’s the Matter with Price Gouging?” |
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| 10/31 (Tue) | Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Questions. Case Study: “The Qatar National Bank Data Hack”. |
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| 11/2 (Thu) | Unit #3 exam. | |
| 11/5 (Sun) | Corporate Social Responsibility (Unit #4) (slides) Reading Questions. Carnegie, “Wealth”. Optional: Farbman, “We Don’t Want Mark Zuckerberg’s Charity”. |
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| 11/7 (Tue) | Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Questions. Porter & Kramer, “Creating Shared Value”. |
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| 11/9 (Thu) | Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Questions. Prahalad, “The Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid”. |
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| 11/12 (Sun) | Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Questions. Karnani, “Romanticizing the Poor”. |
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| 11/14 (Tue) | Class Cancelled: Carmageddon Traffic Apocalypse 🚓🚗🚌🚚🐐🚐🚎🚜🐑🚒🚛🚑 | |
| 11/16 (Thu) | Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Questions. Rangan, Chase & Karim, “The Truth About CSR”. |
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| 11/19 (Sun) | Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Questions. Case Study: “Challenges for Qatarization in the Private Sector”. |
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| 11/21 (Tue) | Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Questions. Rachels, “Coping with Prejudice”. Optional: Qatar General Secretariat for Development Planning, “Increasing Women’s Empowerment”. Optional: Dr. Sheikha Al-Thani, “Women in Qatar: Quotas, Qualifications, and Qatarization”. |
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| 11/23 (Thu) | Corporate Social Responsibility Guest presentation by Fuad Farooqi, Assistant Teaching Professor of Finance, Carnegie Mellon University. Reading Questions. Choudhry, “Why We All Need Banks”. Likierman, “Why We Need Banks”. Augar, “Go Back to Basic Banking”. Thomas, Hennessey & Holtz-Eakin, “What Caused the Finanical Crisis?” Benedikter, “European Answers to the Financial Crisis: Social Banking and Social Finance”. |
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| 11/26 (Sun) | Corporate Social Responsibility Guest presentation by Ilaria Gualtieri, Corporate Social Responsibility & Public Relations Consultant. (slides) Reading Questions. Al Jazeera News, “UN clears Qatar over treatment of migrant workers”. Migrant-Rights.org, “Technical Cooperation Between ILO and Qatar on Workers Rights”. United Nations, “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights”. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Responsible Business Conduct Matters”. |
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| 11/28 (Tue) | Unit #4 exam. | |
| 11/30 (Thu) | Epilogue: Ethical Leadership (slides) Reading Questions. Plato, “The Allegory of the Cave”. |
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| 12/7 (Thu) | The exam will be held from 1:30pm to 4:30pm in Lecture Hall 1213 (our current classroom). | Final exam. |