Ethical Case Scenario

Ethical Case Scenario

Question1: Types of ethical dilemas

Personal Friendships

Michael had several friends including Roger and Daniel. Roger has recently met and started dating a wonderful lady named Phyllis. He is convinced this is a long term relationship. Unknown to Roger, Michael observed them at a restaurant several days ago and realized Phyllis is the wife of his other friend Daniel (Sanders 2003).

Michael is deciding whether to tell Roger that Phyllis is married when he receives a call from Daniel. Daniel suspects his wife is having an affair and since they and Michael share many friends and contacts, he asks if Michael has heard anything regarding an affair.

Societal Dilemmas

An article on ListVerse compiled a list of Top 10 moral dilemmas and asked readers to consider what they would do in those situations. Here is an example of one of the Top 10 ethical dilemmas they proposed:

A pregnant woman leading a group of people out of a cave on a coast is stuck in the mouth of that cave. In a short time high tide will be upon them, and unless she is unstuck, they will all be drowned except the woman, whose head is out of the cave. Fortunately, (or unfortunately,) someone has with him a stick of dynamite. There seems no way to get the pregnant woman loose without using the dynamite which will inevitably kill her; but if they do not use it everyone will drown (DeVito 2008).

Information Access

The advent of email in the business world surely has created new ground for moral dilemmas involving information access and privacy. Tony, a data analyst for a major casino, is working after normal business hours to finish an important project. He realizes that he is missing data that had been sent to his coworker Robert. Tony had inadvertently observed Robert typing his password several days ago and decides to log into Robert's computer and resend the data to himself. Upon doing so, Tony sees an open email regarding gambling bets Robert placed over the last several days with a local sports book. All employees of the casino are forbidden to engage in gambling activities to avoid any hint of conflict of interest (Soren 2010).

Tony knows he should report this but would have to admit to violating the company's information technology regulations by logging into Robert's computer. If he warns Robert to stop his betting, he would also have to ...