More Essay Ideas: Business Ethics & CSR

Are you a student looking for a topic to write on, related to either Business ethics or Corporate Social Responsibility? Or are you an instructor looking for a topic to assign to your class? Our previous resource (“Essay Topics: Business Ethics & CSR”) turned out to be wildly popular. So here are a few more ideas:

1. What ethical considerations should go into establishing a product’s price? (See: A Moral Requirement to Raise Prices? and Manipulating Consumers With Prices that End in “.99” and Ethics of Pricing: Wisconsin vs Meijer’s Low Prices and The Ethics of Pharmaceutical Prices).

2. Are employees owed some say in a company’s direction? (See: “Dragonfly” Brings Google Into Conflict With Employees and Google Employees’ Ethics, and the Pentagon and Google Employees vs Business of War).

3. Are companies responsible for bad behaviour in their supply chain (e.g., by the people who supply the suppliers they buy from directly)? (See: Nestlé discloses slavery in its supply chain and Nestle, Slavery, and Consumer Cost and Patagonia Blogs About ‘Slavery’ in its Own Supply Chain and Murder Charges in Rana Factory Collapse).

  • Also, from the Concise Encyclopedia of Business Ethics: Globalization

4. Are young/junior employees ethically special? (See: Deloitte’s 2018 Millennial Survey and Do First Jobs Shape Young People’s Ethics?).

5. What role, if any, should personal values play in consumer decisions? (See: The Right Reason Not to Buy Nikes and Should Democrats Boycott In-N-Out for Donating to the GOP?, and also May a Coffeehouse Boycott Its (Trump-Loving) Customers?).

6. What role, if any, should a CEO’s own values play in how they run their business? (See: Should CEOs Speak Up on Social Issues? and Musk, Marijuana, and the Obligations of a CEO and CEO: “Black Lives Matter” and Apple’s Tim Cook on Indiana’s Pro-Discrimination Law).

7. How much should CEOs be paid? (See: CEOs Who Make At Least 800 Times What Their Employees Do and New Research About Executive Compensation and A “Relational” Approach to Egalitarianism & Executive Compensation and Compensation and the Drive to Achieve ).

8. What are a corporation’s obligations to society? (See: Verizon, Wildfires, and CSR and Google Collaborating With China’s Repressive Government? and Does CSR Kill Profits? and Corporate Support for Local School: Win-Win CSR? ).

9. What kind of thing is a corporation? (See: Are Corporations Like Little Governments? and Apple: A Corporate Person Made up of People and Stephen L. Carter: If You Like NC Corporate Boycotts, You Favor Corporate Free Speech Rights and maybe also AI Ethics According to Accenture: The Algorithm as Citizen (and More)).

10. What are a company’s environmental obligations? (See:Oranges, Peeled and Packaged and The Environmental Upside of a Horrible Airplane Seating Idea and The Environmental Downside of Solar Power and Volkswagen Criticized for… Controlling Weather and Should Rivers Have Rights?).