Derrick Jones
LS312: Ethics and the Legal Environment
Unit-4 Assignment
Amtrak Case Study
July 26, 2012

First of all lets define the word, “stakeholder”. Stakeholder means people who have an interest in a particular thing. In an organization, for example a stakeholder will include the parties with interest such as employees, suppliers, customers, local communities, among other parties (Ask). In this case the stakeholders would be the crew members, the passengers, the community where this tragedy happened, the towns where Amtrak provides services are stakeholders. All these stakeholders have stakes that are directly or indirectly. The interest for all the stakeholders is to have a safe trip, but in this case the interest for the owners, and the crew members is to not have anything go wrong that may cost them financially. For the passengers, the interest was to travel in a less expensive, but comfortable manner. As for the community and cities where the train traveled, it brought customers too many businesses there. Amtrak’s corporate social responsibility legally was to have some kind of safeguards on the bridge to alert boats know there was a bridge there. We have safeguards that come down at railroad crossings way before the train gets there; so why not have the same kind of safety measures on bridges. The M/V Mauvilla should share some responsibility legally as well. They should have checked to see what the weather was like before they left to see if was safe to travel. Ethically, the lack of anyone coming forward and taking responsible for this tragedy. This was no normal accident. Normal accidents focus on the properties of systems themselves rather than on the errors that owners, designers, and operators make running them (Appendix C, Normal Accidents). Since this wasn’t an accident the people and corporations should do the ethical thing and accept