Question

Use the three criteria for ethical decision-making to analyze the issue. The three criteria are obligations, consequences, and moral issues. Please answer all parts and provide if this issue is ethical and unethical, and why/ why not it may/may not be ethical/unethical.

Scenario: A large grocery chain orders its personnel department to screen out all grocery clerk applicants who have a prison record, a history of alcohol/drug abuse or mental illness, or a problem with obesity. (ethics)

Answer 1

Scenario: A large grocery chain orders its personnel department to screen out all grocery clerk applicants who have a prison record, a history of alcohol/drug abuse or mental illness, or a problem with obesity

Answer

Let us understand the scenario in terms of the obligations, consequences, and moral issues as far as different parties are involved in this sitaution to determine whether it is an ethical or an unethical scenario.

The peronnel department feels that it is their duty to ensure that the grocery clerks are free of some kind of "ill" activities/ habits etc. They feel it is their obligation to ascertain and weed out such people.

The department also feels that if such people stay in the grocery store there could be chances that they repeat their past mistakes or may not be suitable because of some or the other trait that they possess. In such a case, the grocery store's personnel department is concerned about the consequences of keeping such people at job.

Although, personnel department has all the right to ascertain who gets to be recruited as grocery clerk and who needs to be removed from the job, but the moral issue here is that the paramaters that they have selected such as whether or not a person is obese, or has had some mental illness or even for that matter has done something wrong in the past for which he has already been punished, seem to be incorrect way to remove people from the job.

Thus, in my opinion it is completely unethical a situation to screen grocery clerks on such shrewd parameters. Rather hiring and firing decisions should be made on the basis of skill levels of the candidates and not physical characteristics or traits.