Writing and analyzing ethics cases in business and research ethics  (Page 2/5)

Introduction

Learning basic and intermediate moral concepts

• Below is a media file that provides a summary of the basic and intermediate moral concepts that play a key role in business and engineering ethics. (Many of them also apply to research ethics.) This summary, in table form, will help you in forming your case. Which concepts arise in the case you are considering? Can you reform or rewrite the case to bring out other concepts?
• Examples of Basic Moral Concepts : Rights, Duties, Goods, and Virtues.
• Examples of Intermediate Moral Concepts : Conflict of Interest, Confidentiality, Free Speech, Informed Consent, Privacy, Intellectual Property, etc.
• Cases provide an excellent way of learning how these basic and intermediate moral concepts fit into the real world.

This module is designed to help you learn ethics by preparing and analyzing ethics cases.

• Discussing cases will help you learn about basic and intermediate moral concepts. Studying several cases helps you develop a repertoire of examples of different degrees and kinds of instantiations of these concepts in real situations. Discussing these cases and comparing them to one another helps you to develop paradigmatic examples of the concepts and then understand more problematic instances by establishing their relations to the paradigms through analogical reasoning. This process, called by some "prototyping" more accurately reflects the way we understand and use these thick concepts than does the process of formally defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. (See Michael Pritchard, Reasonable Children , and Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination . For a clear and useful explanation of relating problematic cases to paradigms (what they call "line drawing problems"), see Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins, Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases (2000) Wadsworth: 45-52.
• Cases provide the means of converting the freestanding ethics course into an ethics laboratory where you practice decision-making under conditions that mirror real world situations to the greatest degree possible.
• By helping us to develop cases, you keep our ethics program, in all its aspects, as up to date and relevant as possible. Many of these cases will be integrated into the College of Business Administration Ethics Bowl competition.

In this module you will carry out the following activities:

• Study and respond to a taxonomy that spells out different types of ethics cases.
• Receive advice on how to choose, prepare, write, and analyze your case.
• Study different templates for writing and analyzing your case. For example, the template (=procedures) for developing cases used by Dr. Huff at the Computing Cases website provides an excellent model for developing historical, thick cases. Dr. Huff places the development of a socio-technical system analysis at the center of his case writing and analyzing method.
• You will receive advice on how to develop a poster presentation on your case study and your analysis.

What you need to know …

Michael davis in ethics and the university (1999) routledge: 143-174 provides a comprehensive discussion of how the field of practical and professional ethics employs the case study method of teaching.

• He discusses how law schools began to use discussion of legal decisions (law cases) to teach the law.
• Professors presented these cases using the "Socratic Method" or what has also been termed as "testing to destruction." Aggressive questioning is used to get students accustomed to the pressures of making a legal argument in an adversarial context in court. The Socratic Method has never been successfully used in teaching business because questions are not used by managers as weapons in a legal context but as means for gathering the information necessary for making informed decisions.
• Davis also discusses how the Harvard Business School adopted the legal model of teaching by case discussion but quickly changed this methodology to reflect better the underlying dynamics of the business situation.
• Philosophers have also used cases to clarify, rhetorically support, or advance a position in a philosophical controversy. Deciding whether to keep the promise you made to the village chief (on his deathbed) to use his inheritance to build a statute of him or to buy the village children much needed shoes helps to point out ethical conflicts and to advance a theory as a more effective way of addressing these conflicts. The dilemma that Jim in the Jungle faces (made famous by Bernard Williams) that is portrayed in the Mountain Terrorist module also provides an example of this kind of puzzle case.
• Ethics cases began to emerge when physicians brought practical and difficult decisions raising ethical issues to philosophical ethicists for discussion and counsel. These case have also undergone different transformations as they have been used to promote learning and discussion in the different areas of practical and professional ethics.