Imagine that you have been invited to the White House to chair a committee of senators who are charged with developing International Business Ethics Guidelines (IBEG) for the next 10 years. Choose 1 of the following issues:
Human rights
Political involvements by business
Labor and production standards
Briefly discuss the key ethical aspects of this issue, and develop an action plan that would lead people with different perspectives on these issues toward acceptable compromise and consensus.
Remember that resolving ethics issues seldom requires deciding who is right and who is wrong. Rather, it usually requires identifying a grey area of commonality among a diverse set of perspectives and working to build consensus around shared ideas.
Your action plan should reflect more than simply gathering all stakeholders and finding common ground; rather, it should detail the methods and processes that you will use, and the issues and concerns that you will need to consider as you strive to reach consensus on IBEG. For example, how will you identify stakeholders? How will you assign different weights to stakeholders? Are all stakeholders equal? What about stakeholders for whom there is no representative (e.g., wildlife, future generations, etc.)?