Robins & Robins
THE RIGHT THING TO DO
Robbins & Robbins
Possible Defenses by Casings, Inc.
It was the primary responsibility of Robbins & Robbins to have foreknown the risk of explosives getting into its medication before it entered into any formal agreement with Casings, Inc. Although both companies share the ethical responsibility, Robbins & Robbins should have had the greater interest in avoiding the risk. Second, the accounting firm, which worded the clause, was selected by Robbins & Robbins and was necessarily partial towards the company. And the clause was written in small 9-point font and on page 285, signifying the minimal significance given by the framer of the contract and agreed to by Robbins & Robbins. And lastly, Robbins & Robbins had known about the contamination two months before making the recall.
Blanchard and Peale Analysis
Their first of three ethics checks to determine whether a decision is right or not is its legality, either by law or company policy (Lankard, 1991). The company's recall of contaminated products came only after the knowledge of the discovery. The recall was more to save on costs than to do the right thing. It could have been aware of the contamination before signing any agreement with Casings. The second is about balance and fairness to all concerned in the short and long terms. The recall was certainly neither balanced nor fair for the same preceding reasons. It was only a pragmatic decision to save face and on cost. It did not promote any win-win relationship. And the third check is what it...
This was not at all a consideration because it was illegal, unethical and immoral from the start. Pragmatism is opposed to ethics and morality because the right thing to do is not its objective. It only wants the easy way into anything or the easy way out of trouble.
II. Sovereign Immunity
Sovereign means being immune from any outside force (Nicholson, 2014).
Democratic principles, however, surrender individual autonomy to government control in that individuals who elect their leaders in effect forfeit their autonomy to these elected leaders. The nature of sovereignty led to the concept of sovereign immunity, which shields a sovereign from the control and jurisdiction of any court. Sovereign immunity provides that a person or entity cannot be party to a civil or criminal lawsuit unless it consents to be subject to it. Even the sovereign federal government can be sued only if it waives its immunity and only in very specific circumstances. In all other cases, it is protected by sovereign immunity as there is no court that has jurisdiction over it (Nicholson).
Thus, a Canadian, whose son died from a Robbins & Robbins medication, cannot sue the company, strictly speaking (Nicholson, 2014). Canada and the United States are independent sovereign countries. Either is protected by the principle of sovereign immunity. This principle is made more complicated by the effects of globalization and the creation of international law and international bodies. Among these are the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the…
