Step One: Creation

In about 700 words, create and articulate an ethics “case” (a descriptive narrative that embodies an ethical dilemma) in which a company in your industry must determine if it should voluntarily undertake a “good” activity that will also reduce its profits. You may base this narrative on a real-life dilemma found in your research, but a fictionalized and embellished story with additional facts, stakeholders, and emotional and situational complexity is likely to produce a more challenging ethical quandary and a more vibrant opportunity to demonstrate the utility of your Guide’s framework.

Here are just a few considerations when writing a great ethics case:

• Realism
  • A strong case must mirror the ambiguity, uncertainty, and multifaceted nature of actual ethical challenges occurring in a business context.
  • Avoid sanitized or overly simplistic narratives. Grounded in plausible corporate settings, it should include details such as personal interests, cultural pressures, human emotion, organizational structures, reputational concerns, market pressures, and regulatory environments.
• Central Ethical Dilemma with Decision-Maker Perspective
  • At its core, the case should present a clear ethical question or conflict, such as tensions between personal values and role responsibilities, internal institutional requirements versus external moral norms, procedural duties versus desired outcomes, or between two or more unforgiving requirements. The narrative must center on a plausible, well-defined, yet open-ended ethical dilemma.
    • “Should I harm the innocent, or should I save the world?” is not a difficult moral choice. Your dilemma must embody multiple compelling positions, making it very difficult to address. Similarly, avoid binary dilemmas like “Should we pollute, or not?” in favor of “Should we implement voluntary costly pollution controls that may reduce long-term community health risks, but massively constrain profits and prevent internal investments?”
    • Your conflict should involve compelling and conflicting consequences, encouraging readers to explore multiple perspectives without predetermined “right” answers.
  • The casemust position one main stakeholder as the decision-maker (e.g., the board facing a reputational crisis, a CEO addressing a shareholder revolt over his company’s practices, a manager navigating cultural differences of what is expected in global operations). This central stakeholder is who should be facing a decision with several clear, compelling, contradictory, and exclusive choices.
• Stakeholder Conflict and Analysis
  • An effective case explicitly delineates the interests of multiple stakeholders—internal (e.g., employees, shareholders) and external (e.g., communities, regulators)—and explores the ripple effects of decisions across short- and long-term horizons. This fosters a holistic view of ethical ramifications, encouraging readers to weigh duties, consequences and virtues in a business ecosystem where decisions impact financial performance, reputation, and sustainability.

Step Three: Reflection

Lastly, in less than 500 words, provide an objective reflection on the experience of your team applying your Round One guide to your narrative case. An objective reflection might consider some of these questions:

• Did applying your Guide produce a clear recommendation for the decision-maker, or did it reveal unresolved ambiguities or trade-offs? What does this reveal about the guide’s ability to handle real-world ethical complexity in your industry?
• Which elements of your Guide were most helpful or illuminating when analyzing the dilemma?
• Were there any principles, questions, tests, or measures contained in your Guide that proved difficult to apply, or led to unexpected tensions?
• If you found that your Guide addressed (or even solved) your case’s dilemma too cleanly and easily, how would you (did you) revise the case to make the narrative and the protagonist’s choice more nuanced and complicated (and likely more reflective of real-world situations)?
• If you found that your Guide did an inadequate job of addressing the central dilemma of your case, articulate the improvements you might make to your framework.
• Even if it was adequate for this one application, what would you change or improve in your framework, and why?