EASTERN VISAYAS STATE UNIVERSITY

TANAUAN CAMPUS
TANAUAN, LEYTE

GEN ED 006 ETHICS

CASE STUDY
MODULE 3: THE ACT
POLITICAL AND CIVIL RIGHTS

SUBMITTED BY:

GROUP 2- BSOA 3-B

FORNILLOS, RONADETTE

SUBMITTED TO:

ESTELA E. CORNEJO, MBA

PART-TIME INSTRUCTOR
JUNE 2022
 CASE STUDY

A woman is sexually harassed by a top-level senior executive in a large company. She sues
the company, and during settlement discussions she is offered an extremely large monetary
settlement. In the agreement, the woman is required to confirm that the executive did nothing
wrong, and after the agreement is signed the woman is prohibited from discussing anything about
the incident publicly. Before the date scheduled to sign the settlement agreement, the woman's
lawyer mentions that she has heard the executive has done this before, and the settlement amount
is very large because the company probably had a legal obligation to dismiss the executive
previously. The company however wants to keep the executive because he is a big money maker
for the company.

ANALYSIS
Some of the issues raised by this case study include initial issues of unethical and unlawful
conduct, by the executive and the company; whether the company should allow the executive to
continue working because of the revenue he generates, in view of his propensity to harm co-
workers, and whether this action is ethical or reflects integrity; whether the company should
require the woman to state that the executive did nothing wrong as part of the settlement
agreement; whether the woman should agree to this settlement in view of the harm future
employees are being exposed to; and whether the woman is prioritizing justice for herself over
harm to future employees in an acceptable way.
Our law will help the woman solve her case through our political and civil rights. Civil and political
rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from infringement by governments,
social organizations, and private individuals. They ensure one's entitlement to participate in the
civil and political life of society and the state without discrimination or repression. Civil rights are
an essential component of democracy. They're guarantees of equal social opportunities and
protection under the law, regardless of race, religion, or other characteristics.
In contemporary public discourse, the term ’civil rights’ is typically used to refer to a range of
rights narrower than the full set of claims belonging to free and equal citizens. This usage reflects
the now standard idea of civil rights as the rights that members of society have against
discrimination on the basis of race, sex, ethnicity, disability, sexual preference, and other
characteristics regarded as morally objectionable reasons for the distribution of major social
benefits and burdens. Discrimination, in turn, is understood as encompassing those actions,
policies and practices that (wrongfully) disadvantage the members of certain socially salient
groups, on account of their group identity, relative to other members of society (cf. Lippert-
Rasmussen 2014).
Christopher Schmidt argues that the standard idea is a 20th century development, deviating from
the concept of civil rights that prevailed in the decades following the Civil War. He notes that the
earlier concept referred to “the right to contract, own property, sue, testify in court, and the right
to physical security,” all of which were regarded as “fundamental to citizenship”. But “when civil
rights was reborn in the middle decades of the twentieth century,” a “novel” concept emerged that
“centered on a sweeping nondiscrimination principle rather than on a bounded collection of
fundamental rights”.
Robin West paints a similar historical picture, though her focus is on legal doctrine rather than on
the general public understanding. She writes, “We don’t have a civil right to much of anything,
beyond the right to nondiscrimination … under our contemporary conception of civil rights”. West
explains how the U.S. Supreme Court has been instrumental in the current dominance of this idea
of civil rights, but she also points to the role that mainstream legal scholarship has played. By
contrast with this current idea, according to the “classical understanding” held by 19th century
jurists, civil rights “were not simply rights ’not to be discriminated against’ on the basis of
impermissible characteristics,” but also included “unambiguously rights to protection and security,
to enter and enforce contracts, to own buy or sell property” and other categorical claims essential
to “membership in society. As a progressive liberal who seeks to have legal doctrine recognize
substantive economic claims as rights of citizenship, West aims to transcend the standard idea by
subordinating it to an updated version of the classical understanding.
Perhaps surprisingly, many radical activists calling for revolutionary change have ignored any idea
of civil rights broader than the standard one. Accordingly, Angela Davis, who is among the most
prominent of those activists, explains that “the frame of civil rights” is too small to understand the
nature of the black freedom struggle in America and beyond. The struggle “was not only a question
of acquiring the formal rights to fully participate in society, but rather it was also about substantive
rights – it was about jobs, free education, free health care, affordable housing, and also about
ending the racist police occupation of Black communities”. So Davis follows the legal mainstream
in declining to describe as “civil rights” categorical claims to such goods as jobs, housing, health
care and trustworthy policing.
West argues that the standard idea is inextricably connected to a conceptual error. Consider the
right to protection from private violence, which West characterizes as “the irreducible, minimal,
and even quintessential civil right”. Each member of society has such a right, she contends, and,
if the government fails to secure it for everyone, then the civil rights of all are violated,
notwithstanding the fact that there would be no discrimination involved in the failure. Accordingly,
she holds that it is a conceptual mistake to “conflate the idea of nondiscrimination with the idea of
civil rights”.
Additionally, West argues that the standard idea is tied to normative errors, because it fails to
affirm that members of society not only have a right against being deprived of certain benefits for
discriminatory reasons; they also have a categorical right to those benefits. The result is that, given
the standard idea, civil rights are rendered “hollow” and “formal,” lacking substantive content
because they do not mandate outcomes in the distribution of benefits but only require that
processes of distribution be free of discrimination.
For West, the normative deficiency of the standard idea is on display in the Supreme Court’s
rulings regarding education and employment. The court has ruled that there are constitutional
rights against being denied an educational or employment opportunity on grounds of race or sex
but has failed to recognize any categorical constitutional right to education or employment. The
court has even failed to recognize a categorical civil right to police protection. West regards those
failures as reflections of the standard idea and its radically truncated conception of “the duty the
state takes on, when we enter a social compact”.
However, the standard idea is not conceptually or normatively deficient in the ways that West
claims it to be. The idea is consistently conjoined with the recognition that, beyond
antidiscrimination rights, free and equal citizenship requires rights to police protection, education,
and other benefits that modern society can and should provide its members. If the Supreme Court
is wrong in failing to recognize such claims as among the basic rights of citizens, then the problem
is not with the standard idea but rather with the court’s impoverished understanding of free and
equal citizenship.
Additionally, West’s charge that the standard idea renders civil rights “hollow” due to the merely
“formal” character of antidiscrimination rights appears to unduly minimize the normative
significance of claims against discrimination. Even though such claims are, in a sense, “formal,”
claims that are formal can still be morally important. Davis acknowledges this point, writing that
civil rights are “immensely important,” even though she adds that “freedom is more expansive
than civil rights”.
The normative significance of formal rights can be appreciated by considering the right to vote in
a free and fair election. There is no guaranteed or predetermined outcome in such an election, and,
to that extent, the right to vote is formal: it is a right to be part of a process, not a right to any
particular outcome of the process. But the franchise is not normatively “hollow”; rather, it is a
right that has helped persons in a modern society to protect themselves from serious injustice.
Civil rights have often been understood by way of contrast with claims said to belong to different
categories of rights: political, social, welfare and cultural, among others. Competing conceptions
of civil rights have drawn the contrasts in different ways and for different purposes. To the extent
that a particular contrast is used to express a view that unduly limits the scope of claims belonging
to free and equal citizenship, the contrast is subject to critique and revision on the basis of a suitably
capacious idea of civil rights. Such critique and revision were what led to the abandonment of the
once widespread view that political rights are not civil rights. And, in the judgment of many,
though not all, contemporary thinkers, welfare and cultural rights, like political rights, are essential
to the freedom and equality of citizens and so ought to be counted as types of civil rights rather
than as rights of an altogether different kind.

REACTION
In my opinion, the woman has the right to sue and file a case towards the man who sexually
harassed her. It is not an acceptable reason that, because you have the power and money you can
control everything in your hands. Justice and truth will always prevail above all else. The good
always abides with what is right, and the law is fair and just. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits
discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil
rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and
firing. It is important that we seek help from our government or lawmakers. If you take legal action,
there are different kinds of “remedies” you can ask for. Some have to do with money, and others
are more about changing your employer’s behavior. Not everyone can get all of these things. Each
case is different, but these are some common examples of things you can demand, and may be able
to get if you’re successful (i.e. if you win your lawsuit or reach a settlement). If the government
agency decides to investigate your claim, they will likely interview you as well as the person doing
the harassing, and may tell them about your claims. They could also interview your supervisor(s),
coworkers, people in HR, and others who may have witnessed the harassment or know about your
complaint. Government agencies often take months to assign each case to an investigator, so the
whole process could take many months or even years to complete. If you don’t want to wait for
the agency to do or complete an investigation, you may be able to request a “Right-To-Sue” notice
so you can go directly to court. The rules on getting a “Right-to-Sue” notice are different depending
on whether you filed with the EEOC or a state agency. You can ask the agency or the investigator
assigned to your case to find out more.