Showing posts with label Ethical issues. Show all posts

Ethical issues with artificial intelligence

1. Unemployment. What happens after the end of jobs?

The hierarchy of labour is concerned primarily with automation. As we’ve invented ways to automate jobs, we could create room for people to assume more complex roles, moving from the physical work that dominated the pre-industrial globe to the cognitive labour that characterizes strategic and administrative work in our globalized society.

Look at trucking: it currently employs millions of individuals in the United States alone. What will happen to them if the self-driving trucks promised by Tesla’s Elon Musk become widely available in the next decade? But on the other hand, if we consider the lower risk of accidents, self-driving trucks seem like an ethical choice. The same scenario could happen to office workers, as well as to the majority of the workforce in developed countries.

This is where we come to the question of how we are going to spend our time. Most people still rely on selling their time to have enough income to sustain themselves and their families. We can only hope that this opportunity will enable people to find meaning in non-labour activities, such as caring for their families, engaging with their communities and learning new ways to contribute to human society.

If we succeed with the transition, one day we might look back and think that it was barbaric that human beings were required to sell the majority of their waking time just to be able to live.

Fairtrade chief defends cocoa sourcing scheme with Cadbury owner

The chief executive of the Fairtrade Foundation has defended a controversial partnership with Cadbury owner Mondelēz and the creation of a rival sustainable cocoa sourcing scheme.

In his first public comments since it was announced that Cadbury’s Green & Black’s range is launching a new chocolate bar that is neither Fairtrade nor organic, Michael Gidney said it was important that consumers understood how large-scale ethical sourcing could help cocoa farmers - among the poorest in the world - and that the new model could be a template for the future.

The familiar blue and green Fairtrade mark, a gold standard of ethical trading, is this month being ditched from Cadbury’s Dairy Milk range in favour of the new Cocoa Life logo.

Green & Black's new UK chocolate bar will be neither organic nor Fairtrade

Green & Black’s is launching its first UK chocolate bar that is neither organic nor Fairtrade-certified.

The move by the organic chocolate maker – owned by US food giant Mondelēz International, parent of Cadbury – is likely to further undermine the Fairtrademovement amid concerns about a proliferation of rival alternatives.

Founded in 1991 as a pioneering organic brand, Green & Black’s is famous for its Classic bars, which have “organic” displayed prominently on wrappers under the company’s logo. But the new Velvet Edition dark chocolate bars going on sale in UK supermarkets this month makes no claim to be organic.

Sainsbury's AGM faces protests over plan to drop Fairtrade tea

Sainsbury’s has been accused of undermining the Fairtrade movement by experimenting with dropping the ethical mark for its own label tea.

A series of shareholders and campaign groups criticised the supermarket group for dropping Fairtrade at its annual meeting in London on Wednesday, in an increasingly fraught exchange with the company’s board. Outside the event, protesters carried placards expressing their concern at the development.

The protests follow Sainsbury’s recent pilot in which it no longer labels its own-brand teas as Fairtrade, badging them “fairly traded” instead. The company said it was running a pilot with its tea products – but those opposing the change fear it will be extended to other products, including bananas and coffee.

Move by UK supermarkets threatens to bring Fairtrade crashing down

When four Sainsbury’s executives met farmers from some of Africa’s biggest tea-growing co-operatives in a hotel in Nairobi last month it should have been a mutual celebration of Fairtrade, the gold standard of ethical trading and the world’s most trusted and best-known food certification scheme.

But instead of backslapping at the Pride hotel, the world’s largest retailer of Fairtrade products precipitated the greatest crisis in the scheme’s 25-year history by telling the 13 major tea groups and their 228,000 co-operative members that it intended to drop the globally known Fairtrade mark for their produce, and replace it with the phrase “fairly traded”.

In place of the strict rules devised by farmers’ groups working with independent development experts to guarantee consumers that small-scale farmers are being rewarded with decent pay and bonuses, the £23bn-a-year retailer said it planned to set up its own in-house certification scheme, set new ethical standards and introduce a different way to pay the groups.

From next week the company will no longer label its Gold, Red and other bestselling own-brand teas as “Fairtrade” but will call them “fairly traded”. Officially it is a pilot but the suspicion is that Sainsbury’s will then roll out the new standard across other products including bananas and coffee.

L’Oréal to sell Body Shop to Brazil's Natura in €1bn deal

The Body Shop is to be sold in a €1bn (£877m) deal to Brazilian cosmetics company Natura, which owns the Aesop brand.

L’Oréal, the owner of the British ethical retailer, is in exclusive talks with Natura and expected to finalise a deal this year.

L’Oréal put Body Shop up for sale in February. At the time it said it had decided to explore all strategic options for the 40-year-old chain to give it the “best opportunities and full ability to continue its development”.

M&S offers cash grants to community businesses in ethical relaunch

Marks & Spencer has pledged to raise £25m for mental health, heart and cancer charities, and halve food waste across its operations by 2025, as it steps up its ethical commitments under its new chief executive, Steve Rowe.

Rowe, who took charge of M&S just over a year ago, said the fashion, food and homewares retailer was also “determined to play a leading role” in social change by supporting community projects in 10 cities, including Rochdale, Glasgow, Liverpool and Middlesbrough.

M&S’s initiatives include cutting carbon emissions and giving grants of up to £50,000 for community businesses, careers advice to young people, and 10,000 pairs of plimsolls to children starting school.

Can end of unhappy marriage with L'Oréal breathe new life into Body Shop?

The Body Shop could be one step closer to separating from L’Oréal this week as bidders for the ethical beauty chain put forward their initial offers.

The chain has more than 3,000 stores in 66 countries, and sales and profits have come under pressure amid rising competition and an unhappy alliance between two very different brands.

Private equity firms including Apax Partners, CVC and Advent International are thought to be weighing up bids of between £600m and £800m for the company, alongside trade buyers including South Korea’s CJ Group, a media, home shopping and pharmaceuticals conglomerate.

L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics company, confirmed in February it had decided “to explore all strategic options” for The Body Shop “to give it the best opportunities and full ability to continue its development”.

Is Triodos the ethical bank that could replace the Co-op?

Perhaps you are looking for a more ethical home for your current account cash. Or maybe you are a Co-operative Bank customer who is considering closing your account following its well-publicised troubles.

If either of those sound like you – or perhaps you simply don’t want to give your money to one of the “big four” banks – then as of this week there’s a new option. Triodos, which bills itself as “Europe’s leading sustainable bank”, has taken the wraps off its first-ever British personal current account.

The bank is allowing people to register their interest, and in June it will begin sending out invitations to those who have registered to apply for an account.

Founded in the Netherlands in 1980, Triodos set up an office in the UK in 1995 and has been offering savings and investments here for some years. It now has almost 50,000 UK customers, and more than half a million across Europe. It offers current accounts in the Netherlands, Spain and Germany, and says it is now finally ready to launch a full banking service in Britain.

Triodos’s USP is that it only lends money to organisations and projects that are “making a positive difference to society”, whether’s that’s socially, culturally or environmentally. It publishes details of every loan it makes via its website, and its borrowers have included chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage HQ, and Worthy Farm, home to the Glastonbury festival. “We want people to really think about what their bank is doing with their money. Money doesn’t have to be invested in the arms trade, fossil fuels and tobacco – it can be used to do good things that help build the society we want to live in,” says the bank.

Triodos’s green credentials are impeccable, but there is a stumbling block: all customers have to pay a £3 monthly fee (ie £36 a year) for the current account service. That may well prove to be a deal-breaker for some, particularly as the bank isn’t offering any upfront financial incentives to tempt people to sign up.

Triodos is entering a hugely competitive market. Just two days ago M&S Bank announced that new customers who switch to one of its current accounts – there is one with no monthly fee, and one costing £10 a month – will now get up to £185 to spend in M&S. They initially receive a £125 gift card, which will then be topped up with £5 each month they deposit £1,000-plus in their account during the first year. Meanwhile, Halifax has a no-monthly-fee Reward account, where you get a £3 payment each month you pay in £750 or more, plus a £75 switching inducement. This week the Halifax said official figures showed it was “the most switched-to bank on the high street”.

So what is Triodos offering? This is a current account that will work in all the ways you would expect, and can be opened by any UK resident aged 18 or over who meets the eligibility criteria. The account is operated online and via a mobile app. Triodos is not providing a telephone banking service, though it will offer phone-based support, and while it has offices, there are no high street branches.

Sales of Fairtrade goods have risen for the first time since 2013 as the increasing popularity of bananas and coffee sold under the ethical label offset falling sales of cocoa and sugar.

Revenues from produce overseen by the Fairtrade Foundation body, which guarantees a minimum price to farmers and additional payments for use on social projects such as schools or clean water provision, rose 2% to £1.64bn in the UK last year.

“We are in growth despite tough economic times and while the grocery market continues to be in disarray,” said Michael Gidney, chief executive of Fairtrade. “There is a sense of businesses committing to Fairtrade backed by unstinting support from the public.”

The sales will trigger payments of about £30m in premiums, on top of the price paid for goods, for use in social projects in developing countries including Malawi and the Dominican Republic.

The volume of bananas, by far the biggest Fairtrade product in the UK, rose 6% amid strong sales at the likes of Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, which only stock the Fairtrade version of the fruit, while Tesco, the UK’s biggest retailer, began stocking Fairtrade bananas for the first time.

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Thomas Cook cuts boss's payout after shareholders revolt

Thomas Cook has responded to shareholder pressure and reduced the maximum payout for its chief executive under a new long-term bonus plan, after a third of investors voted against it.

In the biggest revolt, 32.7% of the travel company’s shareholders opposed its plan to pay Peter Fankhauser a long-term bonus of up to 225% of his base salary of £703,000, worth about £1.6m a year.

In response, Thomas Cook reduced the maximum potential payout to 200% under the strategic share incentive plan (SSIP), but said it would not use it this year. If used, it would replace the current long-term bonus scheme, the performance share plan (PSP), which can in exceptional circumstances pay out 200%.

Yorkshire fish-lovers set up first ethical sturgeon caviar firm

It is better known for its parkin cake, rhubarb and Sunday roast puddings, but one fishery is hoping to add to Yorkshire’s culinary credentials as what it claims is the world’s first producer of ethically sourced sturgeon caviar, using a technique that does not kill the fish in the process.

KC Caviar, based in Leeds, was set up by the fish enthusiasts John Addey, 63, and his son Mark, 37, in an effort to help save the world’s depleting population of sturgeon.

Mark, a trained civil engineer, had the idea of setting up a sturgeon farm – where the fish could be bred before retiring to lakes across Europe – about six years ago.

The company hopes to cover its costs using a new method of extracting fish eggs, which are salt-cured to produce the rare delicacy, without harming the fish. It expects to produce its first batch of “ethical” caviar next Tuesday.

“Mark has always been into dinosaurs and it is said that sturgeon swam with dinosaurs,” said his father, who was previously involved in the ornamental fish industry. “He got really concerned that the sturgeon were going to be wiped out just as the dinosaurs disappeared.”

Sturgeon are thought to have inhabited Earth for hundreds of millions of years, but are now vulnerable to overfishing and are, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, “more critically endangered than any other group of species”.

KC Caviar has obtained a licence to practice a new technique of inducing roe (or fish eggs) from sturgeon, patented by Prof Angela Koehler of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany.

The process involves following a sturgeon’s natural egg production cycle, monitoring progress using ultrasound scans, before injecting the fish with a protein that induces ovulation. When the eggs are ready, they can be pumped from the belly with gentle massaging. This process can be repeated roughly every 15 months throughout a sturgeon’s lifetime, which may last decades.

“Once we think we have had our money’s worth out of a particular fish and that it’s been a good servant to us, we will release them to have their retirement into a lake,” said John. Some of the fish will retire to a lake owned by the Addey family in Yorkshire, while the father and son are in the process of arranging for some of the smaller fish to take their retirement in lakes in eastern Europe.

The traditional commercial method of collecting caviar involves stunning the fish before removing the ovaries. Another method, which also claims not to kill the fish, involves extracting the eggs in a caesarean-type operation before stitching the stomach back together. However, many fish do not survive the procedure.

John said the new humane method of collecting the delicacy had no impact on its taste. “The taste depends on what the fish have been eating and the water they have been kept in. There are lots of reasons why caviar can have a different taste, but if we have done our job right [our caviar] should taste the same as the others.”

Each of the fish is given a name and a QR code, so customers can find out exactly which animal their caviar came from. One of the farm’s sturgeon, described by John as a “beautiful little fish”, is called Nicola after the first minister of Scotland.

The farm has 82 large females, between 1.2 and 1.4 metres (4ft-4.5ft) long, but plans to have a population of 500 by the end of the year. The fish live in several large insulated polytunnels which are provided with clear spring water by a nearby stream that runs through 28 stock holding tanks.

The ethical Christmas guide

We all have that one friend. The one, just like Leonardo DiCaprio, who likes to educate people about climate change and has gifted their own share of Before The Flood and Inconvenient Truth DVDs. This Christmas, you can show your environmentalist friend that you are listening by making a donation to WildEarth Guardians on their behalf.

WildEarth started in 1989 to fight logging in New Mexico, but it has since expanded its efforts to protect and restore wildlife in the American West. Using your donation, the organization will plant native cottonwoods and willows at one of their river restoration sites. Each Hamilton (a $10 bill) will pay for one new tree. WildEarth will notify your friend about the donation by sending a personalized card.

Could gas from grass rival fracking to heat UK homes?

The grass is always greener than the shale gas on the other side, according to a British businessman who claims grasslands could provide enough gas to heat all of the UK’s homes.

Dale Vince, the chairman of renewable energy company Ecotricity, is investing £10m in the first of a generation of what he calls ‘green gas mills’ that he says could compete against gas from fracking.

The company said its Hampshire plant at Sparsholt College, which has planning permission and is slated to be operational in 2018, will take grass harvested from nearby fields and break it down in an anaerobic digester.

Grass at the plant would be turned into biomethane within 45 days and then injected into the national network, providing the heating needs of more than 4,000 homes.

Business Ethics

A business is a productive organization—an organization whose purpose is to create goods and services for sale, usually at a profit. Business is also an activity. One entity (e.g., a person, an organization) “does business” with another when it exchanges a good or service for valuable consideration. Business ethics can thus be understood as the study of the ethical dimensions of productive organizations and commercial activities. This includes ethical analyses of the production, distribution, marketing, sale, and consumption of goods and services (see also Donaldson & Walsh 2015).

Questions in business ethics are important and relevant to everyone. This is because almost all of us “do business”—i.e., engage in a commercial transaction—almost every day. Moreover, many of us spend a major portion of our lives engaged in, or preparing to engage in, productive activity, on our own or as part of productive organizations. Business activity shapes the world we live in, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill.

Business ethics is a huge field. Philosophers from Aristotle to Rawls have defended positions on topics which can be understood as part of business ethics. At present, there are at least five journals devoted to the field (Business Ethics Quarterly, Business Ethics: A European Review, Business & Society, Business & Society Review, Journal of Business Ethics), and work in business ethics appears in mainstream philosophy and social science journals as well.

This entry summarizes important research on central questions in business ethics, including: In whose interests should firms be managed? Who should manage them? What do firms owe their workers, and what do workers owe their firms? What moral rules should guide firms’ engagement with customers? Should firms try to solve social problems? What responsibility do they have for the behavior of their suppliers? What role should firms play in the political process? Given the vastness of the field, of necessity certain questions in business ethics are not addressed here.

What is ethical behaviour?

A big business has a lot of power, which it can either use responsibly or selfishly. Many firms operate to meet the needs of owners. Ethical firms also carefully consider the implications of what they are doing and the effect it might have on the community and the environment.

Ethics is about doing the right thing. Ethical behaviour requires firms to act in ways that stakeholders consider to be both fair and honest. Managers making ethical decisions take into account:

Impact: who does my decision affect or harm?
Fairness: will my decision be considered fair by those affected?

Six young children harvest crops in a field in Bangladesh. One younf girl has a basket on her head to carry back the crops they pick.

Children harvesting crops in a field in Bangladesh

Many owners believe that acting ethically increases costs and so reduces profits. For example, a business can cut costs by hiring child labour at very low wages in developing countries. Paying below average wages lowers the firm's total costs.

Other businesses such as the Fairtrade Foundation have built an ethical brand image, believing that customers are prepared to pay more for products that consider the environment and pay a reasonable wage. Higher sales compensate for higher costs.

Profits from acting ethically are higher than firms that only consider their own narrow self-interest.

Business activities that meet the requirements of the law, but which are considered unfair by stakeholders can result in bad publicity. For example, a restaurant that pays minimum wage but keeps staff tips to boost profits is not breaking the law. It does, however, run the risk of losing the goodwill of customers.

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Ethics

We believe that conducting business ethically and striving to do the right thing are vital to the success of the company.

Starbucks Ethics & Compliance supports Our Mission & Values and helps protect our culture and our reputation by fostering a culture that is committed to ethical leadership and conducting business with integrity by providing resources that help partners make ethical decisions at work.

We do this by advising and enabling leaders to drive ethical business practices, partnering with the business to ensure effective legal risk management and encouraging partners to speak up if they have questions or concerns.

The majority of reports we receive involve employee relations issues. This trend is consistent with other companies – retail or otherwise – that provide alternative reporting mechanisms as part of a comprehensive ethics and compliance program.

For more information, please email EthicsAndCompliance@Starbucks.com.

What are business ethics?

Acting in an ethical way involves distinguishing between “right” and “wrong” and then making the “right” choice. It is relatively easy to identify unethical business practices. For example, companies should not use child labour. They should not unlawfully use copyrighted materials and processes. They should not engage in bribery.

However, it is not always easy to create similar hard-and-fast definitions of good ethical practice. A company must make a competitive return for its shareholders and treat its employees fairly. A company also has wider responsibilities. It should minimise any harm to the environment and work in ways that do not damage the communities in which it operates. This is known as corporate social responsibility.

Business ethics

Business ethics (also known as corporate ethics) is a form of applied ethics or professional ethics that examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that arise in a business environment. It applies to all aspects of business conduct and is relevant to the conduct of individuals and entire organizations.^[1] These ethics originate from individuals, organizational statements or from the legal system.

Business ethics refers to contemporary organizational standards, principles, sets of values and norms that govern the actions and behavior of an individual in the business organization. Business ethics has normative and descriptive dimensions. As a corporate practice and a career specialization, the field is primarily normative. Academics attempting to understand business behavior employ descriptive methods. The range and quantity of business ethical issues reflects the interaction of profit-maximizing behavior with non-economic concerns.

Interest in business ethics accelerated dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, both within major corporations and within academia. For example, most major corporations today promote their commitment to non-economic values under headings such as ethics codes and social responsibility charters.

Adam Smith said, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."^[2] Governments use laws and regulations to point business behavior in what they perceive to be beneficial directions. Ethics implicitly regulates areas and details of behavior that lie beyond governmental control. The emergence of large corporations with limited relationships and sensitivity to the communities in which they operate accelerated the development of formal ethics regimes.^[3]

Philosophy and moral compass

Norway is rich in oil and natural gas. But it's also a resource success story that could provide a model for other nations. The country invests the lion's share of its oil riches in programs aimed at improving the lives of everyday Norwegians.

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