Phi 208 - Ethics and Moral Reasoning

PHI208: Ethics and Moral Reasoning

Lisette Tucker

Instructor: Christopher Kinney

24 August 2013

This is a story that has hit all Americans to the way ethics is mishandled in the work force. It will show you how it gets covered up too. This happens everywhere when it comes to doing the right thing. Top leaders pushed their companies for more products with fewer resources. The aforementioned scenario led these companies to unethical conflict and outright criminal behaviors either knowingly endorsed by key people or through tacit consent by some of their officers. Unethical behavior by US corporations eventually brought about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by the Bush administration which holds the board of directors accountable on any publicly-held company.

Let’s look at Boeing as an example the US Air Force announced it would lease 100 KC-767 tankers to replace an aging fleet of KC-135’s. The 10-year lease would give the USAF the option to purchase the aircraft at the end of the contract. In September of that year, responding to critics who argued that the lease was exuberantly more costly than an outright purchase, the Department of Defense announced a revised lease of 74 aircraft and a purchase of 26. In December of 2003, the Pentagon announced the project was to be frozen while allegations of corruption by one of its procurement staffers, Darleen Druyun (who had moved to Boeing in January of said year) were investigated. The fallout from this resulted in the resignation of Boeing CEO Philip M. Condit and the termination of CFO Michael M. Sears. Harry Stonecipher, former McDonnell Douglas CEO, replaced Condit. Eventually Druyun pled guilty to inflating the price of the contract while working for the government in an effort to put her in good standing with her current employer, Boeing, and to gain employment for her son-in-law and to keep her daughter from being terminated from Boeing for poor performance. She was also guilty of passing information from competing Airbus to Boeing. She was sentenced to nine months in jail for corruption; fined $5,000, given three years of supervised release and 150 hours of community service (Pelley 2005).

When looking for triggers, conflict may result from one or more triggers. In the Darleen Druyun case, the Air Force policies and procedures, or lack of, was the first trigger to this particular conflict. The role Drunyun played appears to have been on a one person team. Had the right policies and procedures been in place within the Air Force, more checks and balances would have prevented this price fixing on the KC-767 tankers. A second trigger involved different values. Druyun was aware that the USAF was lacking in a policy of checks and balances. She took advantage of this