Suman faces a challenge to make a decision whether to continue working for the lottery company since all her family members are against working for a company that encourages gambling. She understand the effect when poor family members spend their money on lottery tickets but get unlucky to win the big prize.
The decision to launch a campaign that targets minority groups of the country to continue playing the lottery game at a relatively increased cost presents a moral and ethical dilemma. Suman is disappointed that the company seeks to increase their sales revenues from the minority members who in some cases may go hungry when they spend all their money to play lottery games. To her, she thinks it would have been wise to target the rich category of people in the country to play the lottery games at a fairly higher price.
Whereas Suman thinks it is unfair to target the minority category of members in the society, she still wants to encourage people to buy lottery tickets to offer support to the educational goals of the organization where 50% of the sales revenues are dedicated to promoting public education. Coming from a minority group of the society, she understands the need for people and children to acquire formal education.
There are fears of negative publicity for the organization as new changes such as increasing the price of tickets and target the minority category of the society is about to be implemented. Commissioner Ali raises this concern as being one of the ethical issues facing the BC lottery plan.
2. Who are all the Stakeholders?
Suman – She is the newly recruited Director of Events for Marketing
Minority category of the society – they are the consumers of the lottery tickets. They hope to win the big lottery prize when they play.
The Electorate – They voted for the establishment of the lottery firm, hence have the ability to make decisions for the company.
Dmitry – The marketing director of BC lottery company
Members of the society – they are the target customers of BC lottery organization
Ali – The commissioner of the lottery; he is concerned with the possible negative publicity that the organization may attract due to its operations to target minority members to play the lottery at a relatively higher price.
3. What are the interests of each stakeholder in #2 above?
Suman –is the director of events for marketing and she is working for BC lottery to help support public education from a 50% sales revenues of the company. Furthermore, she is charged with the responsibility of organization promotional events to make the market aware of the different lottery products available.
The minority category of the society is interested in playing the lottery game in the hope that they would win the big prize.
The electorate is interested in making sure that the organization operates as established, as well as offer solutions to problems in a manner that promotes the business activities of the organization.
Members of the society are interested in receiving funding and support from BC lottery for public education.
Dmitry is interested to achieve the company goals of increasing the sales revenues of the lottery. He instructs Suman to organize promotional events running within a period of four weeks to increase awareness of the market and target audiences.
Ali, the commissioner of the organization is interested in making sure that the reputation of the organization remains positive as a negative publicity may be damaging to its operations.
4. What alternatives or options are available to Suman?
Suman is disappointed that the campaign launched by the organization targets the minority category of the society, which she comes from. She understands that the people are willing to go hungry just to play the lottery games. Her father was an ardent gambler and all his money was always spent on buying lottery tickets. In my opinion, Suman has two alternatives; to either continue organizing the awareness event to run for four weeks or resign from the position she holds in the company as proceeding with the event planning may result in a dilemma between her beliefs and effects of the lottery campaign on the poor people of the society. However, there seems to be an additional alternative besides resigning and proceeding with the plans of the marketing director. She would approach Dmitry and offer a different opinion about targeting the minority category of the society. If she takes this option, to speak to the marketing director, she may expect resistance but she must present all her facts and why she is disappointed about targeting the minority category of the society. To succeed in changing the officer’s mind about targeting the minority alone, she should first speak to people like Ali who are concerned with the positive publicity of the organization. Ali may understand the disappointment of Suman in the company for targeting only the minority group of the society. In fact, if the society realizes that the lottery company is only targeting minority members, the publicity and reputation of the company may be tarnished, hence Ali would support to change the target audience for the campaign.
i. Speaking to the managers to change the target groups of the society from the minority is one of the alternatives that matches the requirements of the utilitarian approach where the company will seek to offer maximum happiness to the greatest number of people.
ii. Moreover, according to the rights approach, the alternative to include other members of the society is best; regardless of their class and ability to pay for the lottery prices. No one will be discriminated against playing the lottery game.
iii. Finally, this alternative (to speak to other members of the company to not only target the minority members) is consistent with the justice approach as it would be no justice to lock out other members of the society from playing the lottery game.
5. What would you do if you were Suman?
Drawing important points from the egoism principle, I would borrow the ideas that doing the correct thing in any situation may be the action that could best serve the long term interests of that person. The long term interest of Suman is to promote public education for the minority members of the society but targeting the minority group for the lottery tickets is not the best move for the company. Rather than staging an open rebellion or resistance to the decision of the organization, Suman should approach the issue in a composed manner to make sure that no one in the organization feels disgruntled about the change of decisions. Moreover, I would utilize the utility principle to make a decision regarding the ethical issue facing BC lottery. The utility principle holds that the idea that a morally right action can produce the best results or make the greatest number of people happy is the right decision to make. Suman wants to make the public, who make the largest number of stakeholders, happy by taking the right decisions.
