For your paper, 1) write a dialogue of that meeting as it unfolds; OR 2) write the minutes of that meeting as it happened in the past
You belong to the senior management teamof the biopharmaceutial company Merck. It is the late 1970s. “Merck scientists [have] discovered that ivermectin, a drug they produced to control parasites in animals, might help millions of people afflicted by onchocerciasis,” otherwise known as river blindness.[1]These millions of people are poor. There is no way that they, or the countries where they live, will be able to pay for the drug. Moreover, it costs around $500 million in 1977 dollars—around $2 billion in 2017 dollars—to take a drug through research and development and bring it to market. Yet your colleagues on the senior management team seem intent on spending all that money and then giving the drug away for free! This strikes you as madness, not to mention morally wrong, for a publicly-traded corporation like Merck. You will not stand for it, whatever the company’s mission statementhappens to say! (NOTE: The “you” in question here is the fictional you. The non-fictional you may agree with Merck’s decision.)
Fortunately, you read, and recall very well, Milton Friedman’s 1970 article, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” You think Friedman got it right! Now you need to persuade your colleagues, who have become, as Friedman put it, “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”[2]And so you have organized a team meeting.
For your paper, 1) write a dialogue of that meeting as it unfolds; OR 2) write the minutes of that meeting as it happened in the past; OR 3) if the “meeting” is conducted virtually by email, write a series of emailsamong the meeting’s participants. (Imagine that email, too, is a Merck invention, new to the company and as yet unknown to the rest of the world.)
Make sure that you—or maybe Milton Friedman himself, if you can get him to attend the meeting—make Friedman’s argument premise by premise. Also make sure that your colleagues take issue with some number of those premises.
Finally, indicate somehow, at the dialogue’s end, or at the end of the minutes, or in the last of the emails, which side, in your non-fictional judgment, has the stronger argument.
Answer preview For your paper, 1) write a dialogue of that meeting as it unfolds; OR 2) write the minutes of that meeting as it happened in the past
APA
800 words