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Business Ethics and Kant

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Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to discuss how Adelphia Communications’ leadership, particularly the Rigas family, violated the trust of the public and its investors through unethical and illegal business practices. First, a synopsis of the Adelphia scandal will be presented. Next, a brief overview of ethics and how they apply to maintaining good business and public trust will be discussed. Following the ethics overview, an outline of deontology and Kant’s Categorical Imperative will be covered. Finally, the business practices and ethical issues with the Adelphia scandal will be analyzed using the deontological framework and Kant’s Categorical Imperative.
Adelphia Scandal
Adelphia Communications is a company that specializes in telecommunications including cable television and internet service, founded in 1952 by John Rigas. On July 1st, 1986, the company went public. Its new public status meant that it was now required to comply with new regulations, which included filing auditor-approved annual reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and establishing a Board of Directors. Though these new regulations are put in place to protect the company’s new investors and the company itself, we will see that these regulatory requirements did not prevent shady business practices that ended poorly for the company and decimated public trust.
After going public, Adelphia began to quickly grow, becoming the world’s sixth largest cable company in the United States by 2002, the same year that the company became entrenched in scandal. With the influx of capital, Rigas expanded his business and acquired new investors. At the time of the scandal, Adelphia’s annual revenue was $2.9 billion and had 5.5 million subsc...

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Pecorino, P. (2000). Chapter 8: Ethics, The Categorical Imperative. Retrieved on April 18, 2014 from http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/intro_text/
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Sevenoaks School. (2009-13). Introduction to Ethics. Retrieved on April 18, 2014 from http://www.sevenoaksphilosophy.org/ethics/deontology.html
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