Doing What Is Right: The Role of an Applied Ethicist

Abstract

This chapter not only describes some of the major schools of ethics but uses them to uncover additional critical assumptions that startups and existing organizations often make to justify their existence. For instance, from the standpoint of Kantian Ethics, Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb were unethical because they did not subscribe to the following moral maxim:

Whenever the probability, however small, is such that a person will be harmed in any way by a product or service, whether it’s through its misuse or initial design, then the provider is obligated ethically to involve those stakeholders that are necessary to monitor and to remediate potential harmful effects.