try to determine if the outcome will be beneficial for the greatest number of people. According to Robbins (1996), this criterion is the most common for business. Business leaders tend to look at productivity, profits, and efficiency and assume that increases in those signify that their decisions are the right ones.
However, there are two other approaches which have gained some ground in business decision-making. The first is an approach based on rights, which has become a more important element in moral philosophy during the last thirty years. The rights approach to ethical decision-making emphasizes ensuring that people's individual rights are respected and not violated. The most obvious examples of this in business are the increased efforts to ensure that all people have equal opportunities in the workplace.
At the same time that the rights approach offers expanded opportunities for some people, it also creates some new problems. Arthur Dyck (1994) noted that here are actually competing theories of rights, and that some of those theories actually undercut basic rights for some people. He also indicated that many approaches that emphasize rights as the basis of moral decision-making neglect the needs of the community as a whole and disregard the morality of human bonds. It can lead to separation and isolation, while not providing care or nurture for all members of the community.
The rights approach is related to the third business approach, which is a justice approach. Justice is concerned with equity, which is related to equal opportunity, but not identical with it. The rights perspective requires that all people have equal opportunity for promotions, for example. In a justice approach, however, there tends to be more of an emphasis on outcomes.
In Dyck's (1994) discussion of a reconceptualization of the human rights approach, he brings more of a justice perspective to the theory. In his conception, rights m...