Reference no: EM133147633
Decision-Making Scenario:
Imagine that you are an investigator for a private consulting firm which specializes in advising companies on their business practices after they are caught engaging in scandalous or unethical behaviour. You have been hired by Healthstart, a for-profit agency that supplies nurses and other trained healthcare professionals to local hospitals, to review their current business practices. Recently, it was revealed in the news that managers at Healthstart have been approached multiple times over the past five years by Saint John's Hospital with the request that they quietly and discreetly avoid sending them any healthcare staff from any minority ethnic or racial groups when contracted to fill a vacancy. Saint John's is primarily focused on long-term care, and once this story broke in the news, a spokesperson admitted that many of their elderly patients have attitudes about race that younger generations would see as prejudiced. Many of these patients only want white staff members to be assigned to them for their healthcare needs, and the hospital spokesperson told the news that even though managers at Saint John's know that these attitudes are racist, they acknowledge that these people still have a right to healthcare. This is how they justified quietly seeking out only white staff members to deal with these patients.
Both Saint John's and Healthstart knew that these requests for white healthcare workers could not be explicitly written into contracts, because that would be an illegal act of discrimination under provincial and constitutional law. However, according to a source from Healthstart who went on the record for the local newspaper under the condition that they remain anonymous, there is a lot of pressure for Healthstart to agree to fill these contracts anyways. "More hospitals and retirement homes quietly request this sort of thing than you might think," the anonymous source says, "and it's not like we don't find good jobs for the healthcare workers that we represent who aren't white. We just don't choose to send them to institutions like Saint John's that indicate that hiring staff from non-white backgrounds would make it more difficult for them to treat patients there."
As part of your investigation, you were able to identify the newspaper's anonymous source, and it turns out that they are a highly-ranked manager at Healthstart. They agree to meet with you in a coffee-shop during their lunchbreak. You aren't fully satisfied with the explanation that they gave to the newspaper for their behaviour, so you pressure them to give you more details about why Healthstart would agree to such discriminatory demands from these healthcare institutions. "I personally don't agree with discriminating against someone because of their race," they manager confides to you, "but we have a responsibility to these hospitals so that they can continue their operations and supply good-quality healthcare to their patients, regardless of those patients' views. These people still have a right to healthcare, even if we disagree with the way that they look at the world."
As the manager becomes more comfortable speaking to you, you can sense that there are other reasons for their decision as well. You inquire about the implications for their business operations if they chose to refuse these contracts. "We have over 300 healthcare workers at any given time that we need to find work for" the manager says. "And if we don't fill these contracts, not only will we will be letting our workers down, but we also have two or three competitors out there like Nurses4U, Healthcare-Plus, and WeCare that would probably take our place and agree to these contracts anyways."
You think that you have the information that you need, but before you leave, the manager says something else that you find interesting. "Many of these elderly folks, they think that they still live in a unique society that was historically built by people who look like them, think like them, and speak their language." In response to the manager's new argument, you point out that many non-white people have lived in the province for generations, and that they can speak the language just as well as anyone else. "Look," the manager says, "all I'm saying is that these people see the world differently than some of the rest of us. This is just the way that things are done here." Although you sense that the manager from Healthstart has accidentally revealed that they have more sympathy for the discriminatory attitudes of some of their clients than they originally suggested, you aren't sure if that is the case. Instead, you decide to just end the conversation and proceed with writing your report.
Now that you have collected all of your information, you assemble a team of your colleagues at your consulting firm and share your research with them. Much to your surprise, you find out that each of the team members has a very different response to the various ethical dilemmas that lie at the heart of your investigation. It turns out that one of the team members prefers a Kantian approach to solving ethical problems, while other team members choose instead to use utilitarian approach and a virtue ethics approach. To make things even more complicated, the only other member of your team is a cultural relativist. You decide to listen to all of their arguments before drawing your own conclusions for the final report.
- What would the Kantian team member say?
- What would the Utilitarian team member say?
- What would the Virtue Ethicist say?
- What would the Cultural Relativist team member say?
- What advice would you give to Healthstart? Is there any perfect choice for them? What recommendation would you give to the manager of Healthstart about how to approach their decisions in a situation like this in the future?