Let me assume that the terms on which the company performed the work were fair and that the company actually delivered the work fully as agreed. In this case the company is really in the same position as other companies which are owed nothing by the country in question and perhaps never did business there. It would be a good thing for any well-off company or individual to make some contribution to the reconstruction of the earthquake-ravaged country. But the company that is owed the debt has no stronger moral reason to contribute. (It may have a stronger prudential reason, if the money is costly to reclaim or efforts to reclaim it would generate negative publicity. But this is a different matter.)

I am not sure that the company would be legally required to hire you under the circumstances you outline. In many jurisdictions it may well be able to argue that -- qualified though you may be -- you are less suitable than other candidates because you are less likely to be loyal to the company and hence likely to be less effective at promoting its business interests. Be this as it may, there is a clearer and cleaner example of your asymmetry: while you are free not to buy from the company, it is not free not to sell to you. What's the moral rationale for this legal asymmetry? Strong versus weak may well have something to do with it -- and, relatedly, the fact that companies selling to individuals face millions of potential customers whereas individuals buying from companies may not have many to choose from (imagine you had protested against Microsoft and Gates then refused to license you to use Windows). A further point is that companies are artificial agents created pursuant to constitutive...

One relevant factor here is whether the seniority privileges you describe are unjust. If they are long-standing rules fairly administered, then they may not be. Unlike privileges based on race or gender or religion, such seniority privileges do treat everyone equally over time. Everyone is disadvantaged early in her/his tenure on the job, and everyone has an equal opportunity to be advantaged later on (but what about those who die early?). If the privileges are morally defensible in this way, then gratitude is appropriate when a more senior worker waives a privilege for the benefit of a more junior one. Now suppose that, for some reason, the seniority system is not morally defensible after all. Even in this case a senior worker may not be morally obliged to waive her/his privileges. After all, s/he is not responsible for the flaws of the system, and s/he is also not a net beneficiary of these flaws (having presumably gone through many years of disadvantage early in her/his tenure). Once again, then,...

Insofar as you function as a witness, as someone to whom a story is told and who recounts it, I see no ethical problem. Reporters and journalists interview rather worse characters than your client, type up the sometimes dreadful things their sources say, and then publish it all. There nothing unethical in giving an accurate portrait of a flawed person or life. Your case is different in at least two respects. You accept money from the person you are portraying, and you may be expected to (and perhaps usually do) present your characters more favorably than you would do if you sought a balanced and accurate portrait. These two respects may or may not be related. Quite apart from the money, there are reasons to present an old person in favorable light to his or her family, including those who will read the story much later. Both differences make your situation ethically problematic. By portraying a racist in a favorable light, you may appear to share his attitudes and reinforce them in others. By...

Your reasoning appeals to a false dichotomy. You assume that either we give monopoly pricing powers to inventors and thereby effectively deny access to recent drugs to poor patients or we allow generic companies to compete and thereby effective deprive inventors of their rewards and of funds for new research ventures. But there are further options. One would be to allow generic companies to compete immediately (thereby reducing the price of a new medicine to near the marginal cost of production) and then to reward inventors in another way, for example with a reward (out of public funds) proportioned to the impact of their invention on the global disease burden. All patients would benefit for much cheaper access to recent drugs, and taxpayers would pay a little more. Millions of lives would be saved through this innovation -- not merely because poor patients get access to cutting-edge drugs, but also because biotech and pharma companies would gain an incentive to research remedies for the...

National capitalism in the advanced industrialized countries worked after social security legislation -- pioneered by Bismarck in Germany -- was widely instituted (in the US through the New Deal). Such legislation became gradually accepted by the rich owners of capital (productive assets) as they understood (a) the workers' economic power wielded by their unions, (b) their own vulnerability in the event of civil unrest bred by severe domestic poverty, and (c) the advantages of the social security apparatus for stabilizing the economy. Once established, social security legislation is difficult to abolish given universal suffrage, which is now commonplace in the more affluent countries. The globalized capitalism that has been instituted mainly by the US and EU after the end of the Cold War is stimulated mainly by the economic gains it can bring to the owners of productive assets in those rich countries. These gains are of two main kinds. There are, first, the frequently emphasized economic gains from...

I don't see a serious ethical problem with taking a long lunch break, assuming you worked a little longer at the end of the day as needed. Nor is it wrong to take an afternoon off, assuming you properly advised your employer to give him/her a chance to book is as a half-day of vacation. So the only plausible candidate for wrongdoing here is the dishonesty of your excuses.Such dishonesty might be justifiable in three ways. First, it might be that, in the context of your work environment, it is generally understood by employers and employees alike that such dishonesty is standard practice (much like assault is standard practice in a boxing match). Second, it might be that the particular employer you lied to had forfeited any claim to your honesty. S/he might have done this by lying to you, for instance, or by acting wrongly toward other employees who had honestly reported that they were seeking new jobs. Third, it might be that your dishonesty was necessary to achieve some greater good. For...

In regard to the political organization of a society, your question has been extensively and fruitfully debated for centuries, for instance in Plato's Republic, in the Federalist Papers, and in Rawls's work. The discussion shows that social rules, practices, and institutions exert great influence on character and conduct. Ethical conduct is more likely when ethical standards are clearly formulated and discussed, when there is transparency and accountability in decision making, when counter-moral incentives are restrained or suppressed, and when ethical considerations are routinely integrated into decision making processes. In regard to the organization of a business, similar desiderata apply. So, yes, structural design is important, and you do well to pay as much attention to it as you do. Still, this does not show that prevailing attitudes about morality are wrong to put individual agents at the heart of the matter. You are such an agent, and, without your thoughtfulness, your business will not be well...

Yes you are. Your decision to deny others access to the life-savingdrug has led to their death. But how serious is your responsibilityfrom a moral point of view? That depends on the circumstances. Perhapsthe medicine was in short supply and you needed what you had for yourown survival or that of your family. In this case, I think you didnothing wrong. Or perhaps the medicine was in short supply and youchose to give it to those who could pay you the most. This way ofrationing your supply is not beyond moral criticism, but at least yourdrugs saved as many people as possible and so your conduct did notincrease the number of deaths beyond what was unavoidable. Nowconsider drug companies in the real world. They patent their medicinesand then enjoy exclusive rights to sell them at monopoly prices, whichcan be 400 times higher than the marginal cost of production. There aregeneric producers in developing countries which produce much cheaperversions of the same drug for sale to the poor. But the...