2 Understanding Ethical and Legal Considerations

A Brief Introduction to Ethics

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A Brief Introduction to Ethics

Ethics is the study of the principles of conduct that apply to an individual or a group. For some people, ethics is a matter of intuition—what their gut feelings tell them about the rightness or wrongness of an act. Others see ethics in terms of their own religion or the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like them to treat you. Ethicist Manuel G. Velasquez outlines four moral standards that are useful in thinking about ethical dilemmas (2011):

Rights. This standard concerns individuals’ basic needs and welfare. Everyone agrees, for example, that people have a right to a reasonably safe workplace. When we buy a product, we have a right to expect that the information that accompanies it is honest and clear. However, not everything that is desirable is necessarily a right. For example, in some countries, high-quality health care is considered a right. That is, the government is required to provide it, regardless of whether a person can afford to pay for it. In other countries, health care is not considered a right.
Justice. This standard concerns how the costs and benefits of an action or a policy are distributed among a group. For example, the cost of maintaining a high-speed broadband infrastructure should be borne, in part, by people who use it. However, because everyone benefits from the infrastructure, the standard of justice suggests that general funds can also be used to pay for it. Another example: justice requires that people doing the same job receive the same pay, regardless of whether they are male or female, black or white.
Utility. This standard concerns the positive and negative effects that an action or a policy has, will have, or might have on others. For example, if a company is considering closing a plant, the company’s leaders should consider not only the money they would save but also the financial hardship of laid-off workers and the economic effects on the community. One tricky issue in thinking about utility is figuring out the time frame to examine. An action such as laying off employees can have one effect in the short run—improving the company’s quarterly balance sheet—and a very different effect in the long run—hurting the company’s productivity or the quality of its products.
Care. This standard concerns the relationships we have with other individuals. We owe care and consideration to all people, but we have greater responsibilities to people in our families, our workplaces, and our communities. The closer a person is to us, the greater care we owe that person. Therefore, we have greater obligations to members of our family than we do to others in our community.

Although these standards provide a vocabulary for thinking about how to resolve ethical conflicts, they are imprecise and often conflict with each other. Therefore, they cannot provide a systematic method of resolving ethical conflicts. Take the case of a job opportunity in your company. You are a member of the committee that will recommend which of six applicants to hire. One of the six is a friend of yours who has been unable to secure a professional job since graduating from college two years ago. She therefore does not have as much relevant workplace experience as the other five candidates. However, she is enthusiastic about gaining experience in this particular field—and eager to start paying off her student loans.

How can the four standards help you think through the situation? According to the rights standard, lobbying for your friend or against the other applicants would be wrong because all applicants have an ethical right to an evaluation process that considers only their qualifications to do the job. Looking at the situation from the perspective of justice yields the same conclusion: it would be wrong to favor your friend. From the perspective of utility, lobbying for your friend would probably not be in the best interests of the organization, although it might be in your friend’s best interests. Only according to the care standard does lobbying for your friend seem reasonable.

As you think about this case, you have to consider a related question: should you tell the other people on the hiring committee that one of the applicants is your friend? Yes, because they have a right to know about your personal relationship so that they can better evaluate your contributions to the discussion. You might also offer to recuse yourself (that is, not participate in the discussion of this position), leaving it to the other committee members to decide whether your friendship with a candidate represents a conflict of interest.

One more complication in thinking about this case: Let’s say your friend is one of the top two candidates for the job. In your committee, which is made up of seven members, three vote for your friend, but four vote for the other candidate, who already has a very good job. She is a young, highly skilled employee with degrees from prestigious universities. In other words, she is likely to be very successful in the working world, regardless of whether she is offered this particular job. Should the fact that your friend has yet to start her own career affect your thinking about this problem? Some people would say no: the job should be offered to the most qualified applicant. Others would say yes: society does not adequately provide for its less-fortunate members, and because your friend needs the job more and is almost as qualified as the other top applicant, she should get the offer. In other words, some people would focus on the narrow, technical question of determining the best candidate for the job, whereas others would see a much broader social question involving human rights.

Most people do not explore the conflict among rights, justice, utility, and care when they confront a serious ethical dilemma; instead, they simply do what they think is right. Perhaps this is good news. However, the depth of ethical thinking varies dramatically from one person to another, and the consequences of superficial ethical thinking can be profound. For these reasons, ethicists have described a general set of principles that can help people organize their thinking about the role of ethics within an organizational context. These principles form a web of rights and obligations that connect an employee, an organization, and the world in which the organization is situated.

For example, in exchange for their labor, employees enjoy three basic rights: fair wages, safe and healthy working conditions, and due process in the handling of such matters as promotions, salary increases, and firing. Although there is still serious debate about the details of employee rights, such as whether they have the right to freedom from surreptitious surveillance and unreasonable searches in drug investigations, the debate almost always concerns the extent of employees’ rights, not the existence of the basic rights themselves. For instance, ethicists disagree about whether hiring undercover investigators to identify drug users at a job site is an unwarranted intrusion on employees’ rights, but there is no debate about employees’ right to freedom from unwarranted intrusion.