Promotion Of One's Own Interests example essay topic

The Ethics of Student-Faculty Business Deals The Akamai Corporation has meant big money for one Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and one of his students. Back in 1995, Tom Leighton, a professor of applied mathematics at MIT, started playing around with ways to use complex algorithms to ease congestion on the Web. He enlisted several researchers, including one of his graduate students, Danny Lewin. At the time, they weren't thinking about starting a company. But Mr. Lewin, following the keen instincts of a cash-strapped graduate student, suggested they enter the project in the Sloan School's annual business-plan competition. They won the software category in the preliminary round and then entered the finals, where they finished among the top six.

Mr. Leighton and Mr. Lewin were still interested in the technology mainly as an academic exercise, but the possibility that their work could have real-world applications pulled them inevitably into business. They launched Akamai Technologies Inc. in the fall of 1998, and took it public the following October. Opening day saw the stock soar from $26 a share to more than $145, giving the company a day-one market cap of $13.13 billion. This sounds like a great business venture, but there still is a small problem.

Mr. Lewin was one of Mr. Leighton's students when they formed the Akamai Company. This brings about the moral question of the case. Should students and professors be allowed to start companies together? Although there is no clear answer, there is widespread agreement among administrators that schools need to address the question. As a result, many M.B.A. programs are in the process of reviewing and, in many cases, implementing policies and guidelines governing student-professor business collaborations. The burden of this moral question falls mostly on professors since student is not an establish profession and thereby has no formal code of ethics.

On one side of the issue are those who point to ethical considerations and insist that schools can't tolerate the possibility that students may perceive any conflict of interest on the part of a professor. On the other side are those who " ve invested substantial time and money in a business-school education specifically to gain access to professors. These people don't want to consider any restriction on their ability to conduct their business lives as they see fit. Caught in the middle are administrators, who must protect their schools' academic integrity while trying to accommodate students and faculty alike. About a decade ago it wasn't as common for students to start businesses before graduating. But now, business schools increasingly operate like incubators, with entrepreneurial centers funds that invest in students' ideas.

A professor can offer a young company both suggestions and credibility. Most professors also are looking to start companies and expand on their entrepreneurial instincts. The emergence of business school as a starting point for businesses has raised the expectations of students and has complicated what might otherwise be a straightforward ethical question. In theory, of course, it's not the best idea for faculty to start businesses with students, because of the potential for conflicts of interest. If a professor and student are working on a business plan together, for instance, there's a chance that the professor may inflate the student's grade or allow him to skip class, all in the name of rounding up investors and making money. If one student gets an awful grade and a fellow student who has business ties to the professor lands a good one, class morale could suffer even if the student deserves it.

Grades may not matter when it comes time to graduate, but the situation may irritate students who feel they " re getting inferior access to the professor's time and intellect whether or not any real unfairness exists. The appearance of conflict might present more problems then the conflict itself. Laura Hartman, a professor of business ethics at De Paul University, says the issue is the same as it would be were a faculty member and student having a romantic relationship. The acid test for a professor, she says, is this: 'Are you engaged in something that will jeopardize or distort an appropriate relationship with your student?' ' Ms. Hartman concedes that the university environment is rife with possibilities for conflicts of interest. She has often co-written papers with students, for example, and while she believes it has never posed a problem, she acknowledges that someone could argue that she helped to advance certain students' careers by working with them. 'It begins a slippery slope,' 's ays Ms. Hartman.

Business-school administrators by and large agree, and many are racing to get ahead of the student-professor partnership issue before their programs inadvertently generate case studies on what can go wrong. In general, schools fall into two camps: those that have an explicit policy against any financial fraternization between professors and students, and those that don't have formal rules, but assume professors will steer clear of conflicts. In the end it's worth remembering that business schools, by bringing together commerce-obsessed students and faculty, represent highly charged entrepreneurial territory. And just as chaperones at the prom aren't there to prevent teenagers from falling in love, business schools don't want to discourage the capitalistic sparks that can arise from a meeting of like minds. 'A little oversight is probably not a bad idea,' says Akamai's Mr. Leighton. 'But to have draconian rules saying it can't be done limits good things from happening.

That's not necessarily in the best interest of the school. ' Indeed, when the sparks fly just right, they can bring remarkable success -- and that's what business school is all about. Egoism Egoism makes the following claim in regards to ethics, "the individual self is the motivating moral force and the end of moral action". This can then be broken down into the positivist and normative ethics. Positivists would claim that egoism is a factual description of human affairs. This means that people are motivated by their own interests and desires.

Normativist's take the position that people ought to be motivated by their interests and desires. Positive Egoism Positivist egoism is also known as psychological egoism. Psychological egoism offers an account of human nature in which it is believed people are wholly self-centered and self-motivated. In the strong form, the theory asserts that people always act in their own interests.

Even if people disguise their motivation with references to helping others or doing their duty, they may do so according to this theory. Many opponents of this description argue that there is a host of evidence supporting unselfish or duty-bound actions that cannot be said to be a part of the self-interest of the person doing the action. Psychological egoists would then respond by attempting to question the ultimate motive of acting benevolently towards others. They would argue that altruistic or unselfish behavior has a self-interested component being that if the individual were not to offer aid or help, he or she may feel guilty or may look bad in front of a other people or society in large. At this point psychological egoism's validity turns on the question of moral motivation. But since motivation is inherently private, the theory shifts from a theoretical description of human nature to an assumption about human nature.

It moves beyond the possibility of empirical verification and the possibility of empirical negation), and therefore becomes a closed theory. A closed theory is a theory that rejects competing theories on its own terms and is both non-verifiable and non-falsifiable. If psychological egoism is reduced to an assumption concerning human nature, then it follows that it is just as valid to hold a competing theory of human motivation - psychological altruism, for example. Psychological altruism holds that all human action is necessarily other-centered and other-motivated. A parallel analysis of psychological altruism results in opposing conclusions to psychological egoism, and again arguably the theory is just as closed as psychological egoism. If both theories can be validly maintained, it follows that the soundness of either or both must be questioned.

A weak version of psychological egoism accepts the possibility of altruistic or benevolent behavior, but maintains that whenever a choice is made it is by definition the action that the person wants to do at that point. This point is where the limit of psychological egoism comes. In most cases, the choice made at this point is really just a miscalculation of what is in the long term best interest of the person. If a person wants to help the poor, therefore he is acting egoistically. If he ran into a burning building to save a kitten, it must be the case that he wanted to save the kitten. Defining all motivations as what the person wants to do remains challenging.

Rationally the theory becomes self sustaining and therefore unable to provide a useful meaning of motivation. It is basically saying that we are motivated to do what we are motivated to do. Normative Egoism The second variation of egoism, normative egoism, states the agent ought to promote themselves above other people or values. This theory does not attempt to describe human nature, but states how people ought to behave. It comes in two general forms: rational egoism and ethical egoism.

Rational Egoism Rational egoism states that the promotion of one's own interests is always in accordance with reason. In the strong version, not only is it rational to pursue one's own interests, but it is also irrational not to pursue them. In the weak version, it is rational to pursue one's own interests, but there may be occasions when not pursuing them is not necessarily irrational. A problem with rational egoism is that reason may dictate that one's own interests should not govern one's actions. At this point the possibility of conflicting reasons in a society need not be introduced, but one could claim that reason may invoke an impartiality clause, demanding that, in a certain situation, one's interests should not be furthered. For example, consider a free-rider situation.

In grading students' papers, a teacher may reasonably argue that to offer inflated grades is to make his life easier, for grading otherwise would incur negative feedback from students, having to spend time counseling on writing skills, etc. ; it is even foreseeable that inflating grades may never have negative consequences, for he could free-ride on the tougher grading of the rest of the department or university and not worry about the negative consequences of a diminished reputation. However, impartiality considerations demand an alternative course-reasonably it is not right to change grades to make life easier. Here self-interest conflicts with reason. A possible logical flaw in rational egoism is offered as an example in which the pursuit of self-interest results in both people involved being made worse off. This is prominently described in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Two suspects are individually offered different sentences.

Person A, for example, is offered 5 years in prison if he confesses and is told that if his partner doesn't confess he will be given 6 months in jail and his partner 10 years. If he refuses to confess, then A faces 10 years in prison if his partner does confess, but both would only serve two years in prison if they both do not confess. The dominating pay-off strategy is for both to confess, whilst an agreement between A and B not to confess would result in the better solution for the two; however, the incentive is to squeal, in which case both will serve the non-optimal solution of 5 years each. While the Prisoner's Dilemma offers a mathematical example for why self-interested action could lead to a non-optimal stability, it can be countered that this example is a mere miscalculation of self interest. The prisoners could follow the weak version of this theory and consider all possible combinations. If you average the sentences and use this as the optimal situation, then you receive one result, and if you take the extremes you get another result.

Their own interest would have to be calculated and can not just be assumed to be the least amount of jail time. Everyday life rarely generates such limited choices. It is important to keep in mind that the goal is to keep these men in prison as long as possible, so this is a way of tricking them into receiving a sentence that is longer then it has to be. Ethical Egoism Ethical egoism is the theory that the promotion of one's own good is in accordance with morality. In the strong version it is held that it is always moral to promote one's own good and it is never moral not to promote it. In the weak version, it claims that while it is always moral to promote one's good, it is not necessarily immoral not to do.

In the imaginary construction of a world inhabited by a single being, it is possible that the pursuit of morality is the same as the pursuit of self-interest. What is good for the agent is the same as what is in the agent's interests. Arguably, there could never arise an occasion when the agent ought not to pursue self-interest in favor of another morality. While it is possible for the creature to lament previous choices as not conducive to self-interest, the mistake is not a moral mistake but a mistake of identifying self-interest. Presumably this l.