商业伦理概念和案例/第5版（英文原版）

Third, a person's responsibility can also be mitigated by circumstances that
diminish the person's active involvement in the act that caused or brought about
an injury. An engineer may contribute to an unsafe product, forexample,byknowingly drawing up the unsafe design and thus being actively involved in causing thefuture injuries. In contrast, the engineer may be aware of the unsafe features insomebody else's design, but passively stand by without doing any-thingaboutitbecause"that's not my job."In such a case, the engineer is not actively revolved in causing any future injuries. In general, the less one's actualactions contribute to theoutcome of an act, the less one is morally responsible for that outcome(depending,however, on the seriousness of the act). However,if a person has a special (an officially assigned) duty to report or try to prevent certain wrongdoings, then that person is morally responsible for acts he or she refrains from reportingortryingtoprevent even if the person is not otherwise involved in the act. An accountant,forexample, who was hired to report any fraudulent activity observed cannot plead diminished responsibility for a fraud the accountant knowingly failed to report by pleading that she did not actively carry out the fraudulent act. In such cases where aerson has a special (specifi-cally assigned) duty to prevent an njury,freelyandknowingly failing to preventit is wrong. One is responsible for it (along withtheotherguilty party or parties)if one should and could have prevented it but did not.Fourth, the extent to which these three itigatingcircumstancescandiminisherson'sresponsibility for a wrongful injury depends on theseri-ousness of the wrong. For example,ifdoing something is veryseriouslywrong, then even heavy pressures and minimal involvement may not substan-tially reduce a person's responsibility for the act. If mymployer, for example,threatens to fire me unless I sell a used product that I know wlU kill someone,it would be ……