Weee Have a Winner!
From Chris MacDonald's acknowledged Business Ethics blog...
"Most Neglected Business Ethics Issue
Here are the results of the 2nd contest of my blogaversary, which ran on Nov. 21.
The question I posed was this: "what is the most neglected business ethics issue you can name?"
The result was a tie between two very thoughtful entrants.
The first winning entry was from
Murat Sen, of
Murat argues that the most neglected business ethics issue today is the the cluster of issues related to the "baby business" or "fertility business," i.e., the business of helping people to conceive babies. Murat says he's worried that such services are rushing ahead, and certain institutions are making a lot of money off of this business, without sufficient attention being paid to issues such as exploitation, the commodification of life itself, or the validity of the purported "right" to reproduce. Murat also rightly points out that sexy issues like cloning have garnered much more media attention than more mundane (but arguably more significant) issues related to the business side of biotech.
(If you don't immediately see the business ethics issues here, consider the following. In places where it's available, fertility treatments can cost something on the order of $10,000 per treatment...and often several rounds of treatment are required before a successful pregnancy results. But is the service worth it? From what I've read (and I'll admit it's been a while since I looked at the data) the evidence suggests it's not. Very few couples are truly infertile. For most couple's who've tried for a year and failed to conceive, the very best evidence-based prescription is a bottle of wine, a fireplace, and another year of trying. OK, so this is an expensive product that might not be all it's cracked up to be. You could say the same about certain luxury automobiles. The difference lies in the fact that in the case of fertility treatment, the person selling the product is a physician, someone with a trust-based obligation not just to give 'customers' what they want, but to help them figure out what's really best for them. None of this is meant to trivialize the anguish of couples who have trouble conceiving...it's just that that very anguish implies good reason to give careful thought to the kind and quality of product they're paying so handsomely for.)
So, congratulations to Murat. Your copy of John Roberts' The Modern Firm will be on its way to you soon!"
