QUESTION 1 Preferential Treatment at the University of Michigan.
Read case study and answer the following two questions (10 points each). (If the link does not work, the case is in Module 10)
- Use a virtue ethics argument to defend the University of Michigans commitment to diversity.
- Use either a forward-looking or backward-looking justification to defend Proposal 2 (Remember: Proposition 2 prohibits the U. of Michigan from giving preference to individuals on the basis of race, ethnicity, color, gender, or country of origin. So use a forward or backward looking justification to defend merit-based admission policies).
- QUESTION 2 The below case is about a business practice called ‘janitors’ insurance’. Read about the practice and then use a Kantian argument for why businesses should stop purchasing ‘janitors’ insurance.Case: When Michael Rice, a forty-eight-year-old assistant manager at Walmart, was helping a customer carry a television to her car, he had a heart attack and later died. An insurance policy on his life paid out about three hundred thousand dollars. But the money did not go to his wife and two children. It went to Walmart, which had purchased the policy on Rices life and named itself as the beneficiary. A Walmart spokesman acknowledged that the company held life insurance policies on hundreds of its employeesSuch insurance is known in the business as janitors insurance, or dead peasants insurance. Until recently, it was illegal in most states; companies were not considered to have an insurable interest in the lives of their ordinary workers. But during the 1980s, the insurance industry successfully lobbied most state legislatures to relax insurance laws, allowing companies to buy life insurance on the lives of all employees, from the CEO to the mail room clerk.The booming business in janitors insurance was brought to public attention by a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal in 2002. The Journal told of a twenty-nine-year-old man who died of AIDS in 1992, yielding a $339,000 death benefit for the company that owned the store where he had worked briefly. His family received nothing. One article told of a twenty-year-old convenience store clerk in Texas who was shot and killed during a robbery at the store. The company that owned the store offered $60,000 to the young mans widow and child to settle any potential law suite, without revealing that it had received a $250,000 insurance payout for death. The series also reported the grim but little-noticed fact that after the Sept 11. Terror attacks, some of the first life-insurance payouts went not to the victims families, but to their employers. Use Kantian ethics to explain why this practice is wrong.