Kantianism and Utilitarianism in a Company´s Lay Off Procedure

There has been a recent spike in the number of cases of employers terminating the service of their employees in the recent years. Some notable companies who have laid off staff include the aircraft manufacturer, Boeing, HSBC, and General Motors, mostly due to cost reduction exercises and outsourcing (Strain 2014, Lewis 2014). However, there have been some cases where companies are laying off staff due to advancements in technology and implementation of new systems, and one of these companies include Hewlett-Packard (HP), where the company was rapidly trimming down it’s 350 000-person workforce with new technology, with an estimated of 15000 job cuts from the middle of 2013 till the end of this year (2014) (Brown 2013). Bob Brown from ‘Network World’ describes it as one of the ‘bloodiest tech industry layoffs in 2013’. This new reason of employee layoffs, due to replacement of staff with improved systems to boost performance and efficiency in the workplace is relatively new. As a result of the influx in cases like this, a very dire question surfaces, that is, should the companies be responsible for the unemployment due to their information systems. The Britannica Encyclopaedia defines information systems as an integrated set of components for collecting, storing, and processing data and for delivering knowledge, information and other digital media (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2014). This makes the case of HP’s cloud system leading to unemployment as one of the sample cases of companies trimming down staff due to information systems. While some agree and others disagree on the question posed above, this question can actually be viewed from two different angles, based on ethical theories, namely in the Kantianism way and the Act Utilita...

... middle of paper ...

...//caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/80130/part2/sect9.html [Accessed: 24 March 2014].

Encyclopedia Britannica. 2014. Information System. [online] Available at: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/287895/information-system [Accessed: 26 March 2014].

Gaskill, D. 2008. Kantian Ethics. [online] Available at: http://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gaskilld/ethics/Kantian%20Ethics.htm [Accessed: 25 March 2014].

Lewis, J. 2014. Causes of Employee Downsizing. [online] Available at: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/causes-employee-downsizing-38647.html [Accessed: 25 March 2014].

Quinn, M. J. 2013. Ethics for the information age 5th edn., Pearson Education/Addison-Wesley, Upper Saddle River, N. J. .

Strain, M. 2014. Examples of Downsizing in the Business World. [online] Available at: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/examples-downsizing-business-world-22506.html [Accessed: 25 March 2014].