Hi, this is my philosophy course assignment in which you have to write an Argument Reconstruction paper of 800 to 1000 words. In this assignment, you have to reconstruct the argument into the standard

ASPER SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

UNIVERSITY OF MANITIOBA

PHIL 2830 (A02): Business Ethics

Instructor Damian Melamedoff-Vosters

15th July, 2021

Argument Reconstruction Assignment

An Argument against Profit as an Obligation

Brief Summary of Heath Argument:

According to Heath (pp. 540-41), many people think that the problem is that profit is associated with self-interest. Nevertheless, on the other hand, business ethics associate with a behavior that is altruistic or unselfish in some sort. Therefore, the moral status of profit can be described as a “principled constraint on the pursuit of self-interest.” Consequently, if profit is substituted with self-interest, then business ethics refer to some sort of principled constraint on the pursuit of profits rather than a mode of maximizing it.

Heath’s argument can be summarized as follows:

(1) Every action that brings self-interest is unethical. (premise)

(2) Every action that makes profit is self-interest. (premise)

(3) So, every action that makes profit is unethical. (1-2) ( Conclusion )

(4) If every action that makes profit is unethical then business ethics refers to principled constraint on the pursuit of profit. (premise)

(5) So, business ethics refers to principled constraint on the pursuit of profit .(3-4) (Conclusion )

Heath argues for premise (1) by induction . He presents a case: ethics is associate with behavior that is altruistic or unselfish in some sort. Assume if the presented case by Heath is true then any action that is selfish or self-interested are unethical, so any action that beings self-interest is unethical.

Heath does provide a reason to think that (2) is true, since in most people minds profit is associated with self-interest and that is true because an action is self-interest if the consequence of that action is that the person who does it getting rewarded for doing so. Adding more to this premise assume company main goal is to make profit and mangers are company’s employees, so mangers every action would be self-interested to make profit. Therefore, we should think that every action that makes profit is self-interest.

Health does not argue for (4), because he thinks it is obviously true. To see why, assume that every action that makes profit is unethical. This only leaves actions that makes profit is not unethical: actions that makes profit is ethical. Business ethics is associated with behavior that is selfless or altruistic. So, there is no reason to think that profit making actions wouldn’t in fact be unethical. Therefore, on the assumption that every action that makes profit is unethical, we should conclude that business ethics refers to principled constrained on the pursuit of profit.

Conclusion

In this paper, Heath’s claim that an economic system based on the pursuit for profits to be morally impartial has been explained, and the foundation for its proof. The pursuit for profit is ethical since most firms undertake their daily activities to achieve morality and get people to operate more cooperatively rather than maximize their profits. The basic idea is that any socially induced collective action problem poses specific challenges based on moral justification. However, the system of market competition is justified based on the scarcity of practical alternatives. The challenge is showing that the moral status of profit ethics shows that a firm can maximize its profits without exhibiting any form of self-interest. This challenge is a burden of proof that remains impossible to explain.

Works cited

Heath, Joseph. "Business ethics and the ‘end of history’in corporate law." Journal of Business Ethics 102.1 (2011): 5-20.

Heath, Joseph. Morality, competition, and the firm: The market failures approach to business ethics. Oxford University Press, 2014.