4.4 Being an ethical job candidate  (Page 9/9)

Values

• Value : A value "refers to a claim about what is worthwhile, what is good. A value is a single word or phrase that identifies something as being desirable for human beings." Brincat and Wike, Morality and the Professional Life: Values at Work
• Justice : Justice as fairness focuses on giving each individual what is his or her due. Three senses of justice are (1) the proper, fair, and proportionate use of sanctions, punishments and disciplinary measures to enforce ethical standards (retributive justice), (2) the objective, dispassionate, and impartial distribution of the benefits and burdens associated with a system of social cooperation (distributive justice), (3) an objectively determined and fairly administered compensation for harms and injustices suffered by individuals (compensatory justice), and (4) a fair and impartial formulation and administration of rules within a given group.
• Respect : Recognizing and working not to circumvent the autonomy in others and ourselves. (Autonomy is the capacity to make and execute decisions as well as to set forth ends and goals, integrate them into life plans, and use these to constitute active identities.) Respect involves recognizing and respecting rights such as privacy, property, free speech, due process, and free (and informed) consent. Disrespect undermines autonomy through deception, force, or manipulation.
• Responsibility : The ability to develop moral responses appropriate to the moral issues and problems that arise in one's day-to-day experience. Responsibility includes several senses: (1) individuals are (capacity) responsible when they can be called upon to answer for what they do; (2) individuals have (role) responsibilities when they commit to carry out tasks that arise from social and professional roles; (3) responsibility also refers to the way in which one carries out one's obligations. It can range from indifference and negligence to care and diligence. Responsibility in this sense turns into a virtue that formulates diligence and care as excellences worth striving for.
• Honesty – Is honesty telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Or is it a virtue that involves a more delicate balance between extremes of excess and defect? Too much honesty results in harmful bluntness and tactlessness. (“Your child is a hopeless slob. You should disown him.” The former may be true but there are gentler and ultimately more productive ways to communicate this information to the concerned parent.) We are all familiar with too little honesty, the dishonesty that results from lying, deceiving, manipulating, exaggerating, distorting, etc.
• Reasonableness - Defusing disagreement and resolving conflicts through integration. Characteristics include seeking relevant information, listening and responding thoughtfully to others, being open to new ideas, giving reasons for views held, and acknowledging mistakes and misunderstandings. Thus, reasonableness as a virtue includes much more than rationality. (From Michael Pritchard, Reasonable Children)

In making your decision...

1. Try to design a solution that realizes as many values as possible.
2. Wike: “Although values can compete, they don’t conflict.” Try to solve the value competitions in your scenario by integrating the competing values in a solution.
3. Wike: “No value necessarily overrides any other.”
4. Wike: “Aim to realize all values, but where that is impossible, enact the most important values and/or the greatest number of values.”

Having trouble? try this...

1. Nolo Contendere . Take the path of least resistance. (Just go along with what the dominant person in the situation says.)
2. Negotiate . Try to persuade those in the situation to accept a value-integrative solution, compromise, or trade off.
3. Oppose . Someone is trying to force you to so something wrong. Get some courage. Oppose the wrongdoer.
4. Exit . You can’t win in this situation so find a way of getting out. Let someone else deal with it.
5. These options can be evaluated and ranked in terms of the values they realize (or don’t realize) and how feasible they are in the given situation.

Try these ethics tests

1. REVERSIBILITY : Would I think this a good choice if I were among those affected by it?
2. PUBLICITY : Would I want this action published in the newspaper?
3. HARM : Does this action do less harm than any available alternative?
4. FEASIBILITY : Can this solution be implemented given time, technical, economic, legal, and political constraints?

References

1. Victoria S. Wike, “Professional Engineering Ethical Behavior: A Values-based Approach”. Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition, Session 2461.
2. Michael S. Pritchard (1996) Reasonable Children: Moral Education and Moral Learning . Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press: 11.
3. Stephen H. Unger (1994) Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer . New York: John Wiley and Sons: 315-325 (Reprinted with permission of IEEE)
4. Robert C. Solomon (1999) A Better Way to Think About Business: How Personal Integrity Leads to Corporate Success . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 71-114.
5. See Onlineethics, www.onlineethics.org, for case on which “Oh, By the Way” is based.

Conclusion

What have you achieved?

1. You have become aware of how ethical issues can arise in the job candidacy process.
2. You have a better of your obligations and rights in the job candicacy process.
3. You have practiced decision making by evaluating and ranking solutions to ethics cases.
4. You have worked with integrating important ethical values into solutions to ethical problems.

Presentation of module before mechanical engineering class

Presentation: nov 2010

Presentation february 2012

Workshop exercises