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 2152
Syllabus	PDF.
Twitter	#BSE18.
Assistants	Fatema Alsayed, fks@andrew.cmu.edu, @fatemaks
	Amnah Ameen, aameen@andrew.cmu.edu, @amnah_ameen
	Lina Taha, ltaha@andrew.cmu.edu, @linataha7

Grading

Participation (Twitter)	15%
Class Summaries Verbal: sample rubric (explanation). Written: sample rubric (explanation), formatting requirements, and MS-Word template.	10%
4 Unit Exams Lowest unit exam is dropped.	50%
Final Exam	25%

Grade Calculator (Excel)

Schedule

Date	Topic/Readings	Assignments
1/7 (Sun)	Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (Unit #1) (slides)
1/9 (Tue)	Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Guide. Rachels & Rachels, “What Is Morality?” Optional: Lin, “The Ethical Dilemma of Self-Driving Cars” (local file).
1/11 (Thu)	Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Guide. Sen, “Does Business Ethics Make Economic Sense?” Optional: Harris Interactive, “Only One-Quarter of Americans Say Banks are Honest and Trustworthy”.
1/14 (Sun)	Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Guide. Rachels & Rachels, “Subjectivism in Ethics”.
1/16 (Tue)	Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Guide. Weinstein, “If It’s Legal, It’s Ethical... Right?” Optional: Cannon, “Tylenol’s Rebound”.
1/18 (Thu)	Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Guide. Donaldson, “Values in Tension: Ethics Away from Home”. Optional: Zoepf, “Shopgirls”.
1/21 (Sun)	Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Guide. Case Study: “Vodafone Qatar’s Amazon Adventure”.
1/23 (Tue)	Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Guide. Carr, “Is Business Bluffing Ethical?”
1/25 (Thu)	Business Ethics From a Philosophical Perspective (slides) Reading Guide. Crisp, “Persuasive Advertising, Autonomy, and the Creation of Desire”. 60 Minutes, “Undercover Marketing”. Optional: Vranica, “Sony Ericsson Campaign Uses Actors To Push Camera-Phone in Real Life”. Optional: Poppick, “10 Subliminal Retail Tricks You’re Probably Falling For”.
1/28 (Sun)	🚨 The exam will be held in Lecture Hall 1213. 🚨 (This room is on the ground floor, near the food court.)	Unit #1 exam.
1/30 (Tue)	What’s the Point of Business? (Unit #2) (slides) Reading Guide. Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
2/1 (Thu)	What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Guide. Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”. Optional: Heracleous & Lan, “The Myth of Shareholder Capitalism”.
2/4 (Sun)	What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Guide. 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”.
2/6 (Tue)	What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Guide. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”.
2/8 (Thu)	What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Guide. Solomon, A Better Way to Think About Business.
2/11 (Sun)	What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Guide. Duska, “The Why’s of Business Revisited”.
2/13 (Tue)	⚽ Qatar National Sports Day ⚽
2/15 (Thu)	What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Guide. Freeman, “Managing for Stakeholders”.
2/18 (Sun)	What’s the Point of Business? (slides) Reading Guide. Case Study: “Building Construction and Safety After Villaggio”.
2/20 (Tue)	🚨 The exam will be held in Lecture Hall 1213. 🚨 (This room is on the ground floor, near the food court.)	Unit #2 exam.
2/22 (Thu)	Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (Unit#3) (slides) Reading Guide. Moriarty, “Do CEOs Get Paid Too Much?” Optional: Mishel & Davis, “Top CEOs Make 300 Times More than Typical Workers”.
2/25 (Sun)	Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Guide. Epstein, “In Defense of the Contract at Will”.
2/27 (Tue)	Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Guide. McCall, “A Defense of Just Cause Dismissal Rules”.
3/1 (Thu)	Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Guide. Maitland, “The Great Non-Debate Over International Sweatshops”. Optional: Blattman & Dercon, “Everything We Knew About Sweatshops Was Wrong”.
3/4–8	🌴 Spring Break 🌴
3/11 (Sun)	Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Guide. Meyers, “Wrongful Beneficence: Exploitation and Third World Sweatshops”.
3/13 (Tue)	Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Guide. Geva, “Moral Problems of Employing Foreign Workers”.
3/15 (Thu)	Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Guide. Case Study: “Reforming Kafala”.
3/18 (Sun)	Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Guide. Zwolinski, “The Ethics of Price Gouging”. Optional: Evans, “Uber’s Snow Storm Surge Pricing Gouged New Yorkers Big Time”.
3/20 (Tue)	Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Guide. Snyder, “What’s the Matter with Price Gouging?”
3/22 (Thu)	Obligations to Partners, Employees, Clients & Consumers (slides) Reading Guide. Case Study: “The Qatar National Bank Data Hack”.
3/25 (Sun)	🚨 The exam will be held in Lecture Hall 1213. 🚨 (This room is on the ground floor, near the food court.)	Unit #3 exam.
3/27 (Tue)	Corporate Social Responsibility (Unit #4) (slides) Reading Guide. Carnegie, “Wealth”. Optional: Farbman, “We Don’t Want Mark Zuckerberg’s Charity”.
3/29 (Thu)	Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Guide. Porter & Kramer, “Creating Shared Value”.
4/1 (Sun)	Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Guide. Prahalad, “The Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid”.
4/3 (Tue)	Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Guide. Karnani, “Romanticizing the Poor”.
4/5 (Thu)	Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Guide. Rangan, Chase & Karim, “The Truth About CSR”.
4/8 (Sun)	Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Guide. Case Study: “Qatarization in the Private Sector”.
4/10 (Tue)	Corporate Social Responsibility (slides) Reading Guide. 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”.
4/12 (Thu)	Corporate Social Responsibility Guest presentation by Ilaria Gualtieri, Corporate Social Responsibility & Public Relations Consultant.
4/15 (Sun)	Corporate Social Responsibility Guest presentation by Fuad Farooqi, Associate Teaching Professor of Finance, Carnegie Mellon University. Reading Guide. 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”.
4/17 (Tue)	🚨 The exam will be held in Lecture Hall 1213. 🚨 (This room is on the ground floor, near the food court.)	Unit #4 exam.
4/19 (Thu)	Epilogue: Ethical Leadership (slides) Reading Guide. Plato, “The Allegory of the Cave”.
4/26 (Thu)	🚨The exam will be held from 8:30am to 11:30am in Lecture Hall 1213.🚨 (This room is on the ground floor, near the food court.)	Final exam.