Morals vs ethics,
Morals are generally more of a personal belief that is generated from your personal experience, ethics are more socially expected behaviour or professionally expected behaviour that is imposed upon you by outside forces.
Moral values may be overridden by imposed ethics from society, there have been examples of this in history in more extremist cultures that require their citizens to undertake questionable morals in order to achieve what the societal forces require of them.
This was demonstrated by a video Lar's showed to the class where authority figures pressured people into doing inhumane things in the name of science.
Headlines - What doe it mean to behave ethically?
- About social values not laws
- treat others as you would wish to be treated
- evaluating how things affect others 0 particularly negatively
- respectful treatment - treated an equal human being
- privacy protected/safe environment
- health and well being protected
Activity
Discuss in your group if the behaviour described in the examples below is related to ethics:
If it is, why and how?
Can you come up with a solution that would solve the ethical problem?
You find some good images on the web that would look good on your site. You copy and paste them to your blog.
This raises ethical concerns due to using someone else's work without giving them credit, this is ethically wrong in most situations unless you are using it in a way where you are not presenting the work as your own.
The solution to this is ensuring that you give credit to who is responsible for the image.
You are in a hurry to finish an assignment and you find the perfect explanation of a difficult concept on Wikipedia. You decide to copy it into your work.
This raises ethical concerns in much the same way as the previous scenario, without crediting someone for their work you are making it appear as though it was your own work. This is basically theft.
The solution to this is ensuring that you give credit to who is responsible for the text.
You are a medical researcher and you think you have discovered a new drug that cures lung cancer. It worked well on mice although a few of them died of heart problems. You want to test it on people. You recruit 100 lung cancer patients in your treatment programme. You don’t tell them about the new drug. You treat 50 patients with usual drugs and 50 with the new drug to see which is better.
This raises ethical concerns due to the 50 patients taking the new drug not having knowledge of what is being done to them, it also poses danger to those taking the new drug, making it even more of a risk.
The solution to this situation is to only allow people to take the new drug if they are fully aware of the implications and the risk involved.
You are doing your PhD about drug abuse among students. You interview 30 students about their drug use. You discover that one of the students is actually a fairly big-time dealer and you report him to the police.
The conundrum being as to whether you turn the drug dealer into the police or not, before going into this research I think you need to define how far is too far and at what stage you will get the police involved. You may also find a way to research only on people that you do not know and without using their real names, so you are separated from the participants enough so that you are not responsible for their personal actions, making the study a purely scientific one.
You are a researcher looking at the effect of violent computer games on children. You recruit 20 children into your study. Over a month you regularly show them images of violence to see if it has an adverse effect on their behaviour. One of the children becomes quite distressed each time and so you stop showing her images and drop her from the study.
The ethical problem here lies heavily in getting children to participate in this study in the first place, in the case that children do get into this study and you have all required permissions to start showing them violent images I believe it would be ethically correct to pull children from the study if they show any sign of distress. I believe it is unlikely that this type of study would come to fruition, in our country at least.
You want to research how easy it is to hack into your organisation’s computer system by persuading people to divulge login and password details. You recruit a small team to ring up key people in the organisation and persuade them to give either their own or their boss’s details.
I believe that employees need to be warned to some degree before this type of penetration test is done to employees, they need to have information extended to them that tells them how to combat and recognize social engineering. I also believe that this form of test is best done by a third party who then reports the results where the study participants are anonymous. This keeps people privacy intact and allows the company to focus on their security as a whole instead of singling out people.
You are doing initial research in the area of a town where may bars and pubs are located, to estimate the level of problematic social behaviour in the area. your research is independent of the police because you want to observe their behaviour as well. You observe both abusive and violent behaviour.
Concerns in this type of research are that you may find yourself complicit to illegal behaviour, sitting there watching something serious happen does hold you partially liable for the results. Before committing to this study I believe communication with local law enforcement would be required so that they can draw the line of how much behaviour you are legally allowed to observe. With our boundaries defines we can go into the study knowing our ethical limitation within the law.
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