PHI 445 WEEK 3 DISCUSSION

PHI 445 WEEK 3 DISCUSSION Gender Discrimination (Goodyear) In the Case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the problems that would be discussed is based on pay discrimination due to gender. Over many years of career at Goodyear Tire, Lilly Ledbetter was consistently given low rankings in annual performance including salary reviews, and small raises when compared to other employees. Ledbetter filed a discrimination charge against Goodyear for gender discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, affirming that the organization had paid her a low salary due to her gender (Brake & Grossman, 2007). Lilly Ledbetter was awarded over 3 million dollars in punitive damages. However, the judge decreased the money to 360,000 per Title VII’s cap on damages (Brake & Grossman, 2007). The Case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. happened in Gadsen, Alabama, United States (Bader, 2013). Capitalism economic system matches this business since the organization is acting on what interests them not the interest of the community, which motivates the business activity (Fieser, 2015). The laws that govern or affect operations, in this case, is the Equal Pay of Act of 1963, which is also part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The law “prohibited sex-based wage discrimination between men and women in the same workplace, who perform jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort, and responsibility under the same working conditions” (The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission n.d, p.1). Ethical Theory The ethical theory that I chose to apply to the Case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. is deontology. Immanuel Kant designed deontology theory, “which is a moral principle that we should treat each person as an end, and merely as a means to an end” (Fieser, 2015, sec. 1.3). The first characteristic of deontology is that we should treat everyone “as beings with intrinsic value and regard them as highly as we would our own happiness (Feiser, 2015, sec. 1.3). The second characteristic “is a single instinctive principle of duty that we all should follow; the Golden Rule is the best example of this. That is, I should do to others what I would want them to do to me” (Fieser, 2015, Sect. 1.3). When applying the ethical theory to the selected case above one can say that the deontology theory, for instance, believes that persons should be treated as ends and never used merely as means. The approach means that each human being has the right to be treated as a liberated person equal to any other human being and that all people have a correlative moral duty to treat each other as a free and the same person. Discriminatory systems infringe the deontological theory in two forms. Firstly, discrimination is based on the assumption that one population is low in rang to other groups. Secondly, bias puts the groups that are discriminated against in lower social and economic situations. For example, minorities and women have fewer employment opportunities and are given lower salaries. Again, the privilege to be treated as a free and equivalent individual is abused.