Introduction
Currently, people are questioning ethical, social, and legal issues regarding organizations more than ever before. Organizations need to ensure that they maintain ethical standards in the workplace, and social and environmental structures they operate in. The media has ensured that business practices are as transparent as possible. Besides, there has been an increased readiness to believe negative things about organizations. Thus, it is imperative that all organizations keep good moral ground to avoid landing in problems. Recently, Uber has been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons. The article by Edelman “Uber Can’t Be Fixed – It’s Time for Regulators to Shut It Down” in the Harvard Business Review paints a picture of how the company has been engaging in ethically and legally questionable practices. Majority of the critics claim that Uber’s business model is predicated on law breaking (Edelman, 2017). This is because Uber uses ordinary vehicles with no form of licensing or formalities. The decisions and practices of Uber are ethically and legally questionable and they may have adverse effects on the company’s future.
Uber is probably credited for coming up with some significant improvements to the taxi industry. The company was tactical in using smartphone apps to let passengers to request for rides. Besides, Uber was able achieve major cost savings by equipping its drivers with smartphones with preinstalled apps. However, most of Uber’s competitors would have adopted the technology in short order.
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Uber’s greatest advantage is considered unethical and illegal by many. Basically, Uber gained a major advantage over incumbents by using ordinary vehicles that had no special licensing or other formalities (Edelman, 2017). Additionally, the regular non-commercial cars used by Uber’s drivers avoided the costly commercial insurance, commercial plates, commercial registration, background checks, special driver’s license, as well as other expenses. With such immense cost savings, Uber enjoyed a significant advantage over its competitors. The lower costs incurred by Uber resulted in customers being charged lower prices. Consequently, Uber gained immense popularity that translated to business growth. However, such use of noncommercial cars for taxi business was illegal from the start.
Therefore, Uber’s tactics are considered unethical and unlawful because it gained unfair advantage over the incumbents. Most of the publicists of the company failed to address the issue and instead portrayed Uber’s business model as an epitome of innovation (Edelman, 2017). The move has had adverse economic and social effects on the competitors. This is because there is no level playground in the industry where one of the players failed to comply with major legal requirements.
From a consequentialism approach, Uber acted illegally because the consequences of its actions were adverse. For instance, most of the employees that were employed by its competitors lost their jobs. Considering the fact that the drivers who lost the jobs have families to provide for, Uber’s competitive tactics were lacked any moral backing. Besides, Uber failed to pay legal fees to the authorities. This means that the authorities lost a lot of revenue that would have been paid for commercial licensing.
From a deontological point of view, Uber acted unethically too. According to deontologists, the morality of an action is judged based on rules (Garnett, 2014). Uber, as a taxi company had the obligation to comply with all the laws laid down by authorities. However, the company employed various tactics aimed at circumventing such legal hurdles. This gave Uber an unfair advantage over its competitors in the taxi industry.
From the perspective of virtue ethics, Uber ought to consider the welfare of its competitors instead of acting selfishly. Additionally, going against laid down rules does not qualify as a virtue. Generally, a virtuous person is believed to be law abiding and considerate. However, Uber failed the test.
In conclusion, Uber acted unethically from the three perspectives of ethics. The consequentialism approach holds that the morality of an action should be judged based on its consequences. The deontological view holds that the morality of an action is determined by rules. Finally, the virtuous approach of ethics focuses on the character of the individual rather than the action. Uber’s practices could be considered unethical if analyzed on the basis of the three ethical perspectives.
References
Edelman, B. (June 21, 2017). Uber Can’t Be Fixed – It’s Time for Regulators to Shut It Down. Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2017/06/uber-cant-be-fixed-its-time-for-regulators-to-shut-it-down
Garnett, T. (2014). Three perspectives on sustainable food security: efficiency, demand restraint, food system transformation. What role for life cycle assessment?. Journal of Cleaner Production, 73, 10-18.
