2. Deadly Companies
These corporations, if they were individual human beings, would be
locked up for life. Instead, they continue raking in the big bucks.
Human rights abuses, murder, war, eco disasters, and animal
exploitation keep these companies raking in the green.
4. Chevron
• Several big oil companies make this list, but Chevron deserves a special
place.
• Between 1972 to 1993, Chevron (then Texaco) discharged 18 billion
gallons of toxic water into the rain forests of Ecuador without any
remediation, destroying the livelihoods of local farmers and sickening
indigenous populations. Chevron has also done plenty of polluting in
the U.S.
• In 1998, Richmond, California sued Chevron for illegally bypassing
waste water treatments and contaminating local water supplies, ditto in
New Hampshire in 2003.
• Chevron was responsible for the death of several Nigerians who
protested the company’s polluting, exploiting presence in the Nigerian
Delta. Chevron paid the local militia, known for its human rights
abuses, to squash the protests, and even supplied them with
choppers and boats. The military opened fire on the protesters, then
burned their villages to the ground.
6. DeBeers
• Diamonds are a girl’s best friend — unless she lives in the Ivory
Coast. Blood or Conflict Diamonds are the name given to minerals
purchased from insurgencies in war-torn countries.
• Prior to 2000 when the U.N. finally took a stand against the
practice, DeBeers was knowingly funding violent guerrilla
movements in Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Congo with its
diamond purchases.
• In Botswana, DeBeers has been blamed for the “clearing” of land
to be mined for diamonds — including the forcible removal of
indigenous people who had lived there for thousands of years.
The government allegedly cut off the tribe’s water supplies,
threatened, tortured and even hanged resisters.
8. TYSON
• Even if you don’t care about the horrendous animal abuse that has
been documented in Tyson’s factory farms, you have to flinch at
Tyson’s appalling environmental abuses and workers’ rights violations,
as well as the fact that on several occasions, Tyson has allowed e coli
tainted beef to enter the food supply.
• A recent study showed that Tyson’s chickens were the most
salmonella-and-campylobactor filled poultry of all the major suppliers.
• As if that wasn’t gross enough, Tyson has been sued repeatedly for
illegally dumping untreated wastewater into Tulsa’s water supply; after
they were sued the first time, they simply paid the fine and continued
the practice.
• Tyson has made people seriously ill with the ammonia from their
factory farms.
• Tyson is infamous for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants and has even
been accused of human trafficking to supply themselves with cheap
labor.
10. Smith and Wesson
• As the largest manufacturer of handguns (and sub machine
guns) in the U.S., Smith and Wesson is indirectly responsible
for uncountable shooting deaths — not just by the police and
government agencies to which these guns are issued, but by
criminals and by “accident.”
• In a study of the top ten guns involved in crime in the U.S., the
first was the Smith & Wesson .38 Special. Numbers 6 and 7
were also Smith and Wessons. Statistically, studies have
shown that guns are used more often in crime than in self-
defense.
• Of course, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” And
frequently, they use Smith and Wesson guns to do so.
12. Phillip Morris
• Phillip Morris is the largest manufacturer of cigarettes in the U.S.
Cigarettes are known to cause cancer in smokers, as well as birth
defects in unborn children if the mother smokes while pregnant.
• Cigarette smoke contains 43 known carcinogens and over 4,000
chemicals, including carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, hydrogen
cyanide, nicotine, ammonia and arsenic.
• Nicotine, the primary psychoactive chemical in tobacco, has been
shown to be psychologically addictive.
• Smoking raises blood pressure, affects the central nervous system,
and constricts the blood vessels.
• Discarded cigarette butts are a major pollutant as smokers routinely
toss their slow-to-degrade filters on the ground. Many of these
filters make their way into salt or fresh water bodies, where their
chemicals leech out into the water.
• Then again, cigarettes make you look cool.
14. COCA COLA
• America’s favorite soft drink, deadly?
• Well, even if you choose to overlook the childhood obesity
epidemic and how soft drinks market to children to get them to
buy something really, really bad for them, Coca Cola
corporation has wrought devastation in India, where its
factories use up to one million liters of water per day, leaving
tens of thousands of nearby residents dry during the drought
months.
• Then the factories dispose of the wastewater improperly,
contaminating whatever water is left.
• A lawsuit in 2001 accused Coca Cola of hiring paramilitaries in
Columbia which suppressed unionization in the cola plant there
through intimidation, torture and murder
16. Pfizer
• Big Pharma gets rich when you get sick.
• Pfizer, the largest pharmaceutical corporation in the U.S., pleaded
guilty in 2009 to the largest health care fraud in U.S. history,
receiving the largest criminal penalty ever for illegally marketing four
of its drugs. It was Pfizer’s fourth such case.
• As if Pfizer’s massive use of animal experimentation wasn’t heart
wrenching enough, Pfizer decided to use Nigerian children as guinea
pigs. In 1996, Pfizer traveled to Kano, Nigeria to try out an
experimental antibiotic on third-world diseases such as measles,
cholera, and bacterial meningitis. They gave trovafloxacin to
approximately 200 children. Dozens of them died in the experiment,
while many others developed mental and physical deformities.
• According to the EPA, Pfizer can also proudly claim to be among the
top ten companies in America causing the most air pollution.
18. ExxonMobil
• Another oil company that makes the list, ExxonMobil is perhaps best
known for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill which resulted in 11 million
gallons of oil contaminating Prince William Sound. But they have
also been responsible for a huge oil spill in Brooklyn and for aiding in
the decline of Russia’s critically endangered grey whale because of
drilling in its habitat.
• The Political Economy Research Institute ranks ExxonMobil sixth
among corporations emitting airborne pollutants in the United
States.
• ExxonMobil counters not by cleaning up its act, but by funding
scientific studies which refute global warming.
• ExxonMobil was targeted by human rights activists in 2001 when a
lawsuit alleged that ExxonMobil hired Indonesian military who
raped, tortured and murdered while serving as security at their
plant in Aceh.
20. Ringling Brothers and Barnum
and Bailey
• “The Cruelest Show on Earth” is famous for its abuse of wild
animals. In July 2004, Clyde, a young lion traveling with
Ringling, died in a poorly ventilated boxcar while the circus
crossed the Mojave Desert in temperatures exceeding 100
degrees Fahrenheit.
• Circus elephants are routinely confined for days at a time and
beaten with bull hooks and electric prods, and when they’ve
had enough, they lash out.
• In one famous case in 1994, an elephant named Tyke killed
her trainer and injured 12 spectators before being gunned
down on the streets of Honolulu.
• Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus also has an
impressive dead human headcount because of a fire under the
big top in 1944 which killed a hundred spectators — the
canvas was illegally non-flame-retardant.
22. Monsanto
• Monsanto - pushers of genetically modified foods, bovine growth
hormones, and poison.
• Monsanto’s list of evils includes creating the “terminator” seed
which creates plants which never fruit or flower so that farmers
must purchase them anew yearly, lobbying to have “hormone-free”
labels removed from the labels of milk and infant milk replacer
(through bovine growth hormone is believed to be a cancer-
accelerator) as well as a wide range of environmental and human
health violations associated with use of Monsanto’s poisons — most
notably “Agent Orange.”
• Between 1965 and 1972, Monsanto illegally dumped thousands of
tons of highly toxic waste in UK landfills. According to the
Environment Agency the chemicals were polluting groundwater and
air 30 years after they were dumped. Alabama sued Monsanto for
40 years of dumping mercury and PCB into local creeks.
• Plus, Monsanto is infamous for sticking it to the very farmers it
claims to be helping, such as when it sued and jailed a farmer for
saving seed from one season’s crop to plant the next.
24. Nestle
• Sticky-sweet image aside, Nestlé's crimes against man and nature
include massive deforestation in Borneo — the habitat of the critically
endangered orangutan — to grow palm oil, and buying milk from
farms illegally-seized by a despot in Zimbabwe.
• Nestle drew fire from environmentalists for its ridiculous claims that
bottled water is “eco-friendly” when the exact opposite is true. Nestle
attracted worldwide boycott efforts for urging mothers in third-world
countries to use their infant milk replacer instead of breastfeeding,
without warning them of the possible negative effects.
• Supposedly, Nestle hired women to dress as nurses to hand out free
infant formula, which was frequently mixed with contaminated water,
or the children starved when the formula ran out and their mothers
could not afford more and their breast milk had already dried up from
disuse.
• Nestle, of course, denies contributing to the death of thousands of
infants.
26. Meaning of Ethics
• ‘Inquiry into the nature and grounds of
morality where the term morality is taken
to mean judgments, standards, & rules of
conduct.’
• ‘Study & philosophy of human conduct
with an emphasis on determining right &
wrong’
27. What are Moral Standards?
• Morality (from the Latin moralitas
"manner, character, ") is
the of ,
, and between those that
are and those that are
.
• The philosophy of morality is ethics.
• (In a broad sense, philosophy is an activity people
undertake when they seek to understand fundamental
truths about themselves, the world in which they live,
and their relationships to the world and to each other)
28. Can Ethics be Defined?
• ‘Ethics is , is
, because it is
; it not only our
, but also our .’
• While every religion and every culture distinguishes
between right & wrong, the behaviors that are actually
considered to be right & wrong can vary widely. That is
why coming up with a universal definition of ethical
conduct is so challenging.
29. Why be ethical?
• People have lots of reasons for being ethical:
• There is inner benefit. Virtue is its own reward.
• There is personal advantage. It is prudent to be
ethical. It’s good business.
• There is approval. Being ethical leads to self-
esteem, the admiration of loved ones and the
respect of peers.
• There is religion. Good behaviour can please or
help serve a deity.
• There is habit. Ethical actions can fit in with
upbringing or training
30. Why Business Ethics?
• Well publicized scandals resulted in public
outrage:
Deception
Fraud
Lack of Corporate Governance
Lack of Corporate Responsibility
31. Survey of Teens
• ‘Ethics of American Youth 2010’ – Josephson Institute Centre
for Youth Ethics 20th February 2011
• ‘If today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders, unethical
behaviour seems poised to become more common.
89% Being an ethical person is better than
being rich
59% Admitted to cheating on a test within
last year
33% Admitted to using internet to
plagiarize an assignment
33. Specific Issues
Misuse of Company Resources
Abusive Behaviour
Harassment
Accounting Fraud
Conflict of Interest
Defective products
Bribery
Employee theft
34. Agreed today:
•‘The reputation of a Company has
a major effect on its relationship
with employees, investors,
customers, & many other parties.’
