Problem:
Your answers should be concise and should demonstrate your ability to analyze facts, integrate relevant legal and ethical principles and provide an analytical approach to the presented problem. (The bottom line is, support any position that you take in your response.)
Plato believed that the rulers of the ideal society should be paid no more than four times more than the lowliest member of that society. In the US today, executives not uncommonly earn 700 times what the ordinary employees do. And corporate leaders are often recompensed heftily even after leading their companies into disaster. Senior executives and directors of 25 large companies that collapsed between 1999 and 2001 walked away with roughly $3.3 billion in salary, bonuses, and proceeds from the sale of stock options. Business reporter Cassidy traces the use of stock options as a form of executive compensation backs to the stockholder value credo, the notion that CEOs should act as agents for shareholders, and that a smart way to make them keep shareholders', and that a smart way to make them keep shareholders' best interests in focus would be to tie their financial rewards to their firms stock performance. Stock options, granting the right to buy stock in the company at a certain price at a certain future date, become increasingly popular between 1980, when they were given to fewer than once third of the CEOs of publicly traded companies, and 1997, when 92 of the top 200 CEOs received options with an average value of 31 million. Suddenly these executives had very big profits. The cascade of corporate scandals that included Enron was, experts now agree, at least in part caused by greedy senior executives who wanted to get the numbers up by any means necessary.
-Analyze stock options and executive compensation with the ethical toolkit. -How would Milton Friedman want to recompense corporate executives? -How would a utilitarian? - A deontological thinker? -What would a virtue ethicists? -What would be the response of the ethic of care?