Comments on: Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Business Ethics and Society

By: A Mother of 2 Kidlets

A Mother of 2 Kidlets — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:37:12 +0000

The text was a required reading for one of my college courses. The book is laid out in a for vs against style for each case study presented. The cases present valid ethical arguments that are pertinent to today’s society covering a range of topics including consumer rights, privacy and safety. It’s a great research resource as well.
Rating: 5 / 5

By: Susan C. Van Abs

Susan C. Van Abs — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:44:07 +0000

This book was not a good choice for the ethics class I took in college. One example was the Ford Pinto case. The arguments for Ford were very clear, but the case of the explosion was a reprint of an article readily available on the Internet. Many of the case studies were not apples to apples – but bananas to apples – meaning not equally persuasive on both sides.

The instructor who taught our class used old materials like this book -i.e. Ethics in America. If he had used a couple of the cases, that would have been great. There are much better ethics resources out there that are up to date and have recent and relevant cases.
Rating: 3 / 5

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:04:21 +0000

This book covers 19 controversial issues. First the authors bring an issue, give some comments and give two articles that discuss the issue, but are contraversial to each other.

The reason why this book cannot get more than three stars is that the choise of articles wasn’t really successful. Sometimes some of the articles seem not to make sence at all. Some of them don’t answer any questions.

For instance, the one about Patenting Life; second article, which keeps ripping on Rifkin (the author of the previous article) instead of discussing some of the issues Rifkin mentioned in his article against Patenting Life.It’s obvious that he’s for patenting lives, but he doesn’t come even close to some of the issues that Rifkin talks about in his article. He just tries to avoid them because he doesn’t know how to answer to those claims. The author could pick a different articles in this and many other cases as well.

Also the second article of CEO Compensation Issue doesn’t make any sence. Actually, the author of the article was Lisa H. Newton herself. She asserts that CEOs do nothing but writing memos and lay offs, at the same time receiving over 47,000 times (if I remember correctly) more than other people in developing nations like Africa and Asia do, and 209 times more than his employees.Common, this is not called Ethics in Business. She doesn’t face the facts brought up by the author of the article who gave pretty reasonable arguements why CEOs should get that much compensations, why they are worth it.

Some of the articles do not provide with any references or sources of citations from outside sources when needed. I can mention one from Rifkin’s article on patenting life.

The reason why this book got three stars is that, the issues brought by authors are pretty interesting and some are thought provoking. Even though one doesn’t agree with the arguements, you can still learn something by reading them, and try not to repeat some of the blunders made by the authors.

I do recommend you to go for alternatives if you want a book on Business Ethics.
Rating: 3 / 5