Case Study Analysis-D

Critical Thinking Case Study Analysis: GOOGLE

1. Describe the philosophical principle Google's managers adopt when deciding that the benefits of operating in China outweighed the costs. Discuss the philosophical approaches to ethics. Describe the approaches that are favored by most moral philosophers and form the basis for current models of ethical behavior in international business.

Google began to operate in China in 2000, it was two years later that the Chinese authorities blocked the site. Although this came as a surprise for the company’s managers, two weeks later the service was restored. It was clear that China was a strategically important market and Google couldn’t just ignore that.
We begin our approach to philosophical ethics by describing what is called straw men. These approaches can be characterized as the Friedman doctrine, cultural relativism, the righteous moralist and the naive immoralist. The Friedman doctrine says that the only responsibility of business is to create profits, as long as the company remains within the rules of law. Yet this argument breaks down because the rules of the game are not well established and differ from country to country, and that may lead to inadequacies in a company’s social responsibility. The basic belief in cultural relativism is that a company should adopt the culture within which it is doing business. But serious contradiction arises from this approach, for example let’s assume that in one country slavery is legal, does that mean that the company should use slave labor? The righteous moralist approach accepts that the home country’s ethics are the appropriate to follow when acting in foreign countries. This approach too, creates many problems, in cases where the cultural norms of the two countries differ markedly. The approach of the naive immoralist accepts that, if a manager of