1.6 Reasoning and Arguments in Business Ethics

Even if you didn’t know the Masterpiece Cakeshop case or have never worked retail, you’ve probably thought about cases like these before or discussed them with family and friends. In discussing them and deciding what you would do and why, you are reasoning about them. Reasoning about something is thinking carefully about it in order to understand the evidence for it or to come to a conclusion about it. We reason about things every day, and we’ve already done a lot of reasoning in this book.

Here’s another case to reason about. This one also takes place in Colorado and involves an employee’s behavior off the clock.

There’s a lot to reason about with this case, and different people will choose different sides. Some will believe that Hopkins should be allowed to drink anything he wants since his employer has no right to dictate what he does off the clock. Others will think that employers do have a right to demand certain behaviors from employees when they aren’t at work. A third group might think that, regardless of whether Hopkins or American Eagle was right, Hopkins should have realized what was happening and made a more prudent choice. Each of these views represents a position you could take about this ethical problem.

Let’s think a bit more generally about these “positions.” Positions are views we’ve arrived at by reasoning—by thinking carefully about the case in order to understand what evidence there is and what conclusions we could come to. One way to state the result of our reasoning is as we’ve been doing it in the section so far, by putting the position in a sentence like this one: “Hopkins should be allowed to drink whatever he wants because his employer can’t force him to have a certain kind of beer.”

But there’s another way of stating our position about an ethical problem, and this way is common in business ethics and in other areas of ethics too. This method has the advantage of clarifying different parts of our position and their relationships to each other. This second way is to state the position as an argument.

At the most basic level, an argument is just a set of statements. We say “statements,” plural, because it’s useful to divide the statements into two categories. The first category includes the argument’s premises, and the second category has the argument’s conclusion. More precisely, an argument is a set of statements in which some of those statements, the premises, support the other statement, the conclusion.

We say that the premises support the conclusion because premises are the reasons or evidence in favor of the conclusion. The conclusion is what we’re arguing for—that is, it’s the position we want to defend or the point we’re trying to establish. The premises are our way of demonstrating that the conclusion is true. They give us reasons to believe the conclusion.

An argument may have one or more premises, but it has only one conclusion. To be an argument, a set of statements needs both premises and a conclusion. Without a conclusion, a set of premises is just a random collection of facts that don’t add up to anything. Without premises, a conclusion is just an unsupported opinion. But when premises and a conclusion appear together, they create a line of reasoning whose goal is to prove a point or defend a position.

In working with arguments, we want to take care to separate the premises from the conclusion. After all, we want to be sure of what an argument is arguing for. A good way to separate them is to look for key words that often mark a conclusion. The most common of these is “therefore,” but we will also see words like “so,” “thus,” “hence,” and “consequently” marking a conclusion. These terms are clues that what follows is the conclusion in a line of reasoning.

We’ve also got a useful way to organize arguments. We call it premise-conclusion form. To put an argument in this form, we just write each premise on its own line, put the conclusion at the bottom below the premises, and then number each line. Here’s an argument in premise-conclusion form:

1. Vanilla ice cream tastes good.

2. Vanilla ice cream has a nice white color.

3. Ice cream shops always have vanilla ice cream.

4. Therefore, vanilla is the best flavor of ice cream.

Check out what we’ve got here. Statements #1, #2, and #3 are the premises in this argument, and so we write them at the top. They support, or give evidence for, the conclusion. That is, they are supposed to be reasons why we should think the conclusion is true. What we are arguing for is statement #4, the conclusion. We write it at the bottom. That’s an argument in premise-conclusion form.

There are a few things to notice about this argument. First, the premises are a mix of facts (statements #2 and #3) and opinion (statement #1). Second, neither the premises nor the conclusion has to be true. Of course, we want them to be true, but false premises and even false conclusions appear in arguments all the time. Third, some premises are better than others in that they do a better job of giving evidence for the conclusion. Statement #1 would be important in arguing for the conclusion while statement #2 probably doesn’t matter much, though #3 might be helpful.

Now, unfortunately for us, this book is about business ethics rather than ice cream. So let’s give an argument about business ethics—one from the American Eagle distributor case study above:

1. Employers do not have the right to regulate employee behavior off the clock.

2. Therefore, American Eagle did not have the right to fire Hopkins for his beer choice outside of work.

This argument captures one of the positions we discussed above. Writing this position in premise-conclusion form helps us see that the argument has one premise supporting our conclusion, which we came to by reasoning about the ethical problem.

We could put the opposing position in an argument too:

1. Employers can regulate at least some aspects of employee behavior off the clock.

2. Therefore, American Eagle was within its rights to terminate Hopkins for his beer choice outside of work.

This argument also has a single premise supporting a conclusion. It’s possible to add additional premises in order to make the argument clearer; here’s an expanded version:

1. Employers can regulate at least some aspects of employee behavior off the clock.

2. One such aspect is whether employees use products of competing companies.

3. Therefore, American Eagle was within its rights to terminate Hopkins for his beer choice outside of work.

The expanded version of this argument clarifies the position by showing that Hopkins’ drink choice is one of the things an employer can regulate. The argument might leave out other behaviors, like an employee’s sleep schedule or television viewing.

The conclusion here is the same as the previous argument. The difference is that we have an additional premise, which makes the argument more detailed and the relationships between its parts easier to see.

In business ethics it’s common to represent our reasoning as an argument. In fact, a more precise definition of reasoning says that it’s the process of creating, strengthening, criticizing, and evaluating arguments. We’ll see lots of arguments in this class, about both case studies and other issues. Thinking in terms of arguments will help us sharpen our ability to understand ethical problems and the reasoning behind them.