Ethical issues

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Ethical issues
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• Alecia Swasy wrote an article in Wall street
  Journal about some problems in the company
• The disclosures had entailed serious breaches of
  security, like the release of the company's
  capital spending figures.
• The management was sure that this could not have
  been possible without somebody in the company
  leaking information. The company has the right to
  get loyalty from employees
• Company ahs the right to know who has leaked it

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• Ohio law prohibits employees from disclosing
  confidential information about their company.
• So when an internal inquiry failed to uncover the
  sources of The Journal's information, Procter
  Gamble turned to the police, who obtained
  subpoenas allowing them to check for calls to the
  newspaper's office in Pittsburgh and to the
  Pittsburgh home of Alecia Swasy, the reporter who
  had written the articles.

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• Law-enforcement officials in Ohio have searched
  the records of every telephone user in
  southwestern Ohio to determine who, if anyone,
  called a Wall Street Journal reporter to provide
  information that Proctor Gamble said was
  confidential and protected by state law.

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• More than 800,000 phone records were subpoenaed.
• The investigation was headed by a Cincinnati
  police officer who is also a P. G. employee.

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• The sources have not been found, and the company
  has said it wants the entire matter dropped.
• But in the weeks since disclosure of the
  telephone search, the company has been a target
  of intense criticism by civil libertarians.

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Later..

• Its chairman says the Procter Gamble Company,
  this city's leading employer, made an
  embarrassing error in judgment three months ago
  when it got the local police to trace hundreds of
  thousands of telephone calls in an effort to
  identify a reporter's sources.

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The problems

• Freedom of individuals
• Privacy
• Rights
• Rights of the journalist
• In order to identify the elak, others cannot be
  treated as means
• After all it was not a trade secret or a formula
  (coco cola)

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Privacy

• Organizations collect data for effective
  management of men
• What personal data is actually required?
• How will such data be obtained?
• Under what circumstances such data be released or
  used?

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Using data

• Personal information as an input to managerial
  decisions regarding
• Hiring
• Work assignment
• Compensation and benefits
• Promotions
• termination

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Using data

• Release of this data to external organizations
• Selling them to marketing firms

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Importance of privacy

• Privacy is an instrumental value
• Different societies different concepts of
  privacy
• Different situations and circumstances
  different degrees of resepct for privacy war,
  revolution etc.
• Essential for personal growth, creativity and
  rogress

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Importance of privacy

• Allows us to accept help from trusted friends
  without exposing to the public
• Allows thinkers to experiment with unorthodox
  ideas without exposing
• Threat to privacy is threat to our very integrity
  as persons.

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Non-intrusion theory

• Being let alone
• Being free from intrusion

• Confuses condition (content) of privacy with
  right to privacy
• Confuse privacy with liberty (being let alone)

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Seclusion theory

• Being alone
• Voluntary and temporary withdrawal of a person
  form the general society through physical means
  in a state of solitude
• Different from liberty

• Confuse privacy with solitude
• More alone more privacy one has
• Robinson Cruse

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Control theory

• Nor secrecy
• Control over information about oneself
• An aspect of liberty
• Some information that I may share within a close
  circle of individuals, but not with all
• A necessary context of relationships love,
  friendship and trust

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Control theory

• Autonomy of individuals
• Separates privacy from both liberty and solitude
• Recognizes the aspect of choice to grant as
  well as deny individuals access to infom about
  oneself

• One is never able to have complete control over
  every piece of information about oneself
• It suggests that one could reveal every bit of
  information about oneself to others and yet
  retain personal privacy
• Confuse privacy with autonomy

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Limitation theory

• Privacy consists of the condition of having
  access to information about oneself limited or
  restricted in certain contexts
• Recognizes the importance of setting contexts or
  zones of privacy

• Underestimate the role of control or choice
• Tends to suggest that to the extent that access
  to information about a person is limited, the
  more privacy that person has. Here privacy is
  confused with secrecy

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Combined theory

• Control/restricted access theory
• An individual has privacy in a STUATION if in
  that particular situation the individual is
  protected from intrusion, interference and
  information access from others.

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Responsibility
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FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

• Freedom and determinism Freedom of choice
• No freedom no ethics
• Determinism
• External environment Super Ego, Society
• Human nature hedonism, Thomas Hobes etc.
• Other human beings Will to Power (Neitzsche),
  Survival of the fittest.

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What is freedom?

• Non interference Negative
• Capability to act willingly Positive
• Capability to choose consciously Action
  Choice

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Non-interference

• Alienation
• Absence of moral obligation
• Free from circumstances logically and
  practically impossible
• Free to do anything not possible as there will
  be limitations
• Our subjective choice

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Act willingly - Choose consciously

• Refer to an ability
• Autonomy not subjectivity

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Choose autonomously- act willingly

• Employ reason
• To analyse circumstances
• To understand the potentials of a given
  situations
• Not proclaiming ultimate freedom from all
  external authority

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The two constituents of Free Choice

• What we choose to do is not merely determined by
  external pressure and conditioning
• Situational choices take place here and there
• Understand possibilities
• Evaluate
• Understand the potentials of a given situation

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Responsibility - organizational context

• Avoid harming
• Pollution control
• Consumer care
• Working conditions

• Contributory
• Improve quality
• Respond positively towards social needs Eg. Merck
  Co
• Participation in social construction

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Case of chemical leakage

• Gopal is a Supervisor of a Chemical Co. One day
  he gets a message from another department. Check
  for open caustic valves. Supply tank is empty.
  Pump still running.
• Hence, either there is a leak or a valve is open.
• Gopal found that a valve is open in his
  department.
• Cleaning is costly
• The lead operator Jairaj forgot to close it.
• Who is responsible?

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Case of chemical leakage

• Gopal was confused.
• He remembers that when he joined the department,
  Jairaj took him around to show how the
  distribution system works. He observed that while
  the acid distribution piping has spring loaded
  valves that automatically close when not in use,
  the caustic valves have to be manually operated.

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Malpractice model

• A1. Gopal was a disciplined professional. Does
  everything belong within his purview?
• A1. But Gopal conforms to the standard operating
  procedures of his profession. Spring-loaded
  valves are costly. Moreover Jairajs job is to
  take care of such things.

• A2. But he noticed that the caustic valves do
  not have spring loaded valves and have to be
  manually operated. He could have got them
  changed.
• A2. This is a very narrow view. It is minimalist
  and legalistic. This is the result of a view of
  responsibility which links the latter with blame.
  It looks for the person who has done it in order
  to blame him. It is based on the deterrent view
  of punishment.

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Reasonable care model

• Gopal feels that he is also responsible.
• Though I am not expected to go around and check
  all the valves, I could have prevented it from
  happening.
• There may be a standard of reasonableness as seen
  by a normal, prudent non-professional that is
  more demanding than the mere minimalist
  professional standard.

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Reasonable care model

• Explores what virtues or qualities of character
  professionals should have. Positive view
• What ought to be done without necessarily blaming
  or faulting. No focus on fault or blame
• No link between responsibility and blame.
  Responsibility is a virtue
• Other-regarding Intrinsically
  motivational
• Binds persons together. Focus on common
  good

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Impediments to responsibility

• Self Interest
• Failure to see beyond our horizon.
• Failure to see the larger picture.
• .

• Self Deception
• Do unto others as you would have others do unto
  you.
• Confront yourselves honestly and ask if you would
  approve of others treating as in the same way as
  we treat them

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• Rationalization
• Eerybody does it. So you have to do it in order
  to survive.
• In the name of ideology.

• Weakness of Will
• No courage
• Give way to temptation

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• Ego-Centric Thinking
• Not egoistic Limited perspective
• A special form of ignorance inability to
  understand things rom other perspectives.

• Ignorance
• Of vital information. An engineer does not know
  the potential danger of a design.

• Microscopic Vision
• Seing only ne aspect
• Overimportance to one aspect.