Ethical Obligations and Decision-Making in Accounting: Text and Cases 4th Edition Solution Manual

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Ethical Obligations and Decision Making in Accounting, 4/e1Chapter 1Discussion QuestionsSuggested Discussion and Solutions1.A common ethical dilemma used to distinguish between philosophical reasoningmethods is the following. Imagine that you are standing on a footbridge spanningsome trolley tracks. You seethat a runaway trolley is threatening to kill five people.Standing next to you, in between the oncoming trolley and the five people, is arailway worker wearing a large backpack. You quickly realize that the only way tosave the people is to push the man off the bridge and onto the tracks below. Theman will die, but the bulk of his body and the pack will stop the trolley fromreaching the others. (You quickly understand that you can’t jump yourself becauseyou aren’t large enough to stop the trolley, and there’s no time to put on the man’sbackpack.) Legal concerns aside, would it be ethical for you to save the five peopleby pushing this stranger to his death? Use the deontological and teleologicalmethods to reason out what you would do and why.Is it Ethical to Save FivePeople at the Expense of One?Lessons from the TalmudThe Trolley Problem is a thought experiment in ethics, first introduced by Philippa Footin 1967. Others have also extensively analyzed the problem including Judith JarvisThomason, Peter Unger, and Frances Kamm as recently as 1996. The authors used theseproblems in ethics class to challenge students’ moral intuition.The choice is between saving five lives at the cost of taking one life. Before we get to the“answers,” wewant to explain how one researcher is using MRI technology to map brainresponse while analyzing the dilemma. Joshua Greene at Harvard University was moreconcerned to understand why we have the intuitions, so he used functional MagneticResonance Imaging, or fMRI, to examine what happens in people’s brains when theymake these moral judgments.Greene found that people asked to make a moral judgment about “personal” violations,like pushing the stranger off the footbridge, showed increased activity in areas of thebrain associated with the emotions. This was not the case with people asked to makejudgments about relatively “impersonal” violations like throwing a switch. Moreover, theminority of subjects who did consider that it would be right to push the stranger off thefootbridge took longer to reach this judgment than those who said that doingso would bewrong. Interestingresults to say the least.Many do not believe it to be ethical to intentionally end someone else's life whether it isto save others or not. Most do not believe it is a moral responsibility to sacrifice one lifein order that others may go on. If you push someone in the way to save others, you may

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