Assignment Guidelines

For the following questions, be sure to connect to the reading material in your book. This is a
writing assignment, so answers should be written in complete and coherent sentences and
paragraphs. Answers in the A range will refer to the text and fully explain how the concepts
learned in the text apply to the question.

You may type your answers directly into this document after the prompts, save it, and then
upload it into the submission box.

Play through the Moral Minefield level for this week and answer the following questions:

1. Copy and paste (or screenshot) your Level overview and scores. You can find this
information again in your Overview & Profile.

2. Reflect on the scenarios presented in the game. Was there anything you found
particularly difficult? Anything that surprised you?

After completing the last level of Moral Minefield, I actually found this level to be difficult. I

think I found most of the scenarios difficult because they are scenarios that I have never

encountered before in my career. I found one scenario in particular surprising. In this scenario,
“the director of sales had presented unreasonable target sales for the sales team to meet or else

there would be termination of employees” (Eigames, 2021). Employees started to log presales

that did not exist so that they could meet their “goal”. What I found surprising was the person

that is primarily accountable for this infraction is that director of sales and not the employees. I

understand how the director would be held accountable for holding unreachable goals, but the

employees are also responsible for their actions. The ethical principal presented was that

“accountability must exist throughout the entire organization for it to be meaningful” (Eigames,

2021). For me, the employees knew they were not upholding the company’s standards which

they should also be held accountable.

3. Explain one of the decision-making scenarios you were given in this level and analyze it
in terms of one of this week’s theories.
(Note: for full credit, be sure you name the theory you are using, explain the theory fully, and
then explain how the scenario illustrates that theory)

One of the decision-making scenarios that was given in this level involved an employee

publicly revealing sensitive internal information pointing to the safety of the product. The

question was should that employee be publicly challenged by the company’s representatives?

The correct answer is simply no. There are many reasons for this simple answer, but one reason

why is because it can be applied to normative stakeholder theory. Normative stakeholder theory

is “the notion that shareholders must always come first and that business executives should take

account of all the stakeholders that are affected by corporate activity” (Fryer, 2015). In this

scenario if the representatives would have publicly challenged the employee, it could negatively

affect all that are involved, and they would not be taking account of all the stakeholders affected

by Ulban. “In any scenario the company’s actions must be consistent” (Eigames, 2021). If the
company was not consistent in this scenario, they would be going against the normative

stakeholder theory and not putting their stakeholders first.

4. How could you use the concepts discussed in this simulation in your job today? Relate
these concepts to the other course materials and to your own experiences.
(Note: for full credit, be sure discuss a specific scenario, a specific example from your own
experiences, and a specific connection to something you learned from the text)

One scenario that can be related to my job today was the scenario I talked about above

relating to the director of sales. Like I stated above, “the director of sales had presented

unreasonable target sales for the sales team to meet or else there would be termination of

employees” (Eigames, 2021). Employees started to log presales that did not exist so that they

could meet their “goal” so that termination would not occur. In my past job, I have seen higher

up leadership set unreachable goals to their employees that they no longer “want” for the

company. For example, getting a sales graph to a certain goal when there are many other factors

that contribute to the graph besides “sales”. In the moral minefield scenario, the employees did

what they could to make sure they did not get terminated because they have expenses in their life

that they need to pay for. In my past job, that’s exactly what happened too. The employees broke

standards to keep their job because they will do what they can to pay their bills and provide for

their families. This scenario can be related to Immanuel Kant’s formula of “end in itself”. This

formula proposes that “we have a duty to treat all other people as end in themselves and never

simply as a mean to an end” (Fryer, 2015). In other words, “we should never use other people to

bring about some objective that we desire” (Fryer, 2015). In both the level scenario and my job

scenario, higher up executives used their employees and threats to bring an objective that they

desired which is what Kant proposed not to do. It is also not the ethical thing to do as it is using
“inappropriate pressure and pressure tactics by superiors for them to reach a desired outcome”

(Eigames, 2021).
 References

Eigames. (2021). Retrieved from https://play.eigames.com/game/26#/

Fryer, M. (2015). Ethics theory & business practice. Los Angeles: Sage.