Deaf by Design: A Business Argument Against Engineering Disabled Offspring

Dennis Cooley ()

Journal of Business Ethics, 2007, vol. 71, issue 2, 209-227

Abstract: If Solomon is correct in labeling businesses as community citizens because they “are part and parcel of the communities in which they live and flourish, and the responsibilities that they bear are ... intrinsic to their very existence as social entities,â€\x9D then it follows that other community citizens have reciprocal duties toward them that they, as community citizens, have to any other community citizen. One of these duties is not to harm needlessly another community citizen without its permission. One issue affecting business is genetically engineering children to have characteristics, e.g., deafness, which render them disabled in work environments. Since business is a very large part of society, citizen responsibilities toward it in regard to intentionally creating deaf children should be examined. It is my contention that designing disabled offspring is unethical on the grounds that it causes undue injury to businesses without their permission in any form. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2007

Keywords: business ethics; deaf; disabled; genetic engineering; Amercians with Disabilities Act; Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; undue harm; acquiescence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-006-9135-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:71:y:2007:i:2:p:209-227

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-006-9135-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().