Four Moral Principles Of Yadanan Ethics

Ethics is the discipline that examines one’s moral standards or the moral standards of a society to evaluate their reasonableness and their implications for one’s life. It asks how these standards apply to one’s life and whether these standards are reasonable or unreasonable – that is, whether they are supported by good reasons or poor ones. In brief, ethics deals with understanding and differentiating right from wrong. Unocal activities in conducting in Yadana Field project can be discussed from the four moral principles – utilitarian, rights, justice, and caring perspectives.

Utilitarian is a moral principle that claims that something is right to the extent that it diminishes social costs and increases social benefits, while the core concept

An entitlement may derived from a legal system that permits or empowers a person to act in a specified way or that requires others to act in certain ways toward that person, which known as legal right. While human rights (or moral rights) means the rights that all human beings everywhere possess to an equal extent simply by virtue of being human beings. From the case study, the human rights groups issued the report which claiming that the Burmese army was using forced labour and brutalizing the Karen population to provide ‘security’ for Unocal workers and equipment. In addition, a report of 1995 which commissioned by Unocal stated that ‘egregious human rights violations have occurred, and are occurring now, in southern Burma...’. All these proved that there was a conflict with the right perspective. Thus, Unocal was wrong in investing in the Yadana Field project and conducting in the ensuing project as during the time period of contract, the Unocal violated the contract against the human rights and used the forced labour. From this case, the Karen population had the rights to claim on investment of Unocal. However, Unocal also had their rights to invest in the project. Therefore, both sides should be tolerated and find an appropriate solution to achieve a win-win

There are three categories of justice, which are distributive justice, retributive justice, and compensatory justice. Distributive justice is concerning about distributing society’s benefits and burdens fairly. From this point of view, Unocal made the wrong decision in investing the Yadana Field project due to the fact of several reports from the U.S. State Department, non-profit organisations and even Unocal’s own study showed that although the benefit of the project could have in theory been distributed to all the Burma via government development. Retributive justice refers to the fairness when blaming or punishing persons for doing wrong. Punishment is morally accepted for breaking a law or rule. From this view, the decision of Unocal in investing the pipeline project also considered as wrong decision because of it was sued both by Federal and State courts in U.S. and the ensuing bad publicity and boycotts by consumers in the U.S. eventually forced Unocal out of business by merged with Chevron. While compensatory justice concerns about the restoring to a person what the person lost when he or she was wronged by someone. From this viewpoint, decision of Unocal was right in investing the pipeline project as Karen population suffered as a result of the project were compensated through the out of court