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ethics Guide

ethIcS and ProfeSSIonal reSPonSIbIlIty

Suppose you’re a young marketing professional who
has just taken a new promotional campaign to market. The
executive committee asks you to present a summary of the
sales effect of the campaign, and you produce the graph
shown in Figure 1. As shown, your campaign was just in
the nick of time; sales were starting to fall the moment your 7PKVU 5QNF
campaign kicked in. After that, sales boomed.
But note the vertical axis has no quantitative labels. If
you add quantities, as shown in Figure 2, the performance
is less impressive. It appears that the substantial growth
amounts to less than 20 units. Still the curve of the graph is
impressive, and if no one does the arithmetic, your campaign +PVTQFWEVKQP QH 0GY %CORCKIP
will appear successful. Figure 1
This impressive shape is only possible, however, because
Figure 2 is not drawn to scale. If you draw it to scale, as shown
in Figure 3, your campaign’s success is, well, problematic, at
least for you.
Which of these graphs do you present to the commit-
tee? Each chapter of this text includes an Ethics Guide that
explores ethical and responsible behavior in a variety of MIS- 7PKVU 5QNF
related contexts. In this chapter, we’ll examine the ethics of
data and information.
Centuries of philosophical thought have addressed the
question “What is right behavior?” and we can’t begin to dis-
cuss all of it here. You will learn much of it, however, in your
business ethics class. For our purposes, we’ll use two of the +PVTQFWEVKQP QH 0GY %CORCKIP
major pillars in the philosophy of ethics. We introduce the Figure 2
first one here and the second in Chapter 2.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant defined the 5ECNG &TCYKPI
categorical imperative as the principle that one should behave )TQYVJ TCVG UKPEG
only in a way that one would want the behavior to be a universal
law. Stealing is not such behavior because if everyone steals,
nothing can be owned. Stealing cannot be a universal law.
Similarly, lying cannot be consistent with the categorical im- 7PKVU 5QNF
perative because if everyone lies, words are useless.
When you ask whether a behavior is consistent with this
principle, a good litmus test is “Are you willing to publish your
behavior to the world? Are you willing to put it on your Face-
book page? Are you willing to say what you’ve done to all the
players involved?” If not, your behavior is not ethical, at least +PVTQFWEVKQP QH 0GY %CORCKIP
not in the sense of Kant’s categorical imperative. Figure 3
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