Ethical Decision Making

Ethics Situation #1

The mood at Baileyville High School is tense with anticipation. For the first time in many, many years, the varsity basketball team has made it to the state semifinals. The community is excited too, and everyone is making plans to attend the big event next Saturday night.Jeff, the varsity coach, has been waiting for years to field such a team. Speed, teamwork, balance: they've got it all. Only one more week to practice, he tells his team, and not a rule can be broken. Everyone must be at practice each night at the regularly scheduled time: No Exceptions.Brad and Mike are two of the team's starters.  From their perspective, they're indispensable to the team, the guys who will bring victory to Baileyville. They decide—why, no one will ever know—to show up an hour late to the next day's practice.

Jeff is furious. They have deliberately disobeyed his orders. The rule says they should be suspended for one full week. If he follows the rule, Brad and Mike will not play in the semifinals. But the whole team is depending on them.  What should he do?

Ethics Situation #2

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.

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 reveal the source of his information. What does Tony do in this situation?

Ethics Situation #3
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. What should they do?

Cheating Statistics- An ethical crisis

This is a listing of various survey results related to test cheating.
According to surveys in U.S. News and World Report:

• 80% of “high-achieving” high school students admit to cheating.
• 51% of high school students did not believe cheating was wrong.
• 95% of cheating high school students said that they had not been detected.
• 75% of college students admitted cheating, and 90% of college students didn’t believe cheaters would be caught.
• Almost 85% of college students said cheating was necessary to get ahead.

Professor Donald McCabe, leading expert in academic integrity, in a May 2001 study of over 4500 high school students, found the following:

• 72% of students reported one or more instances of serious cheating on written work
• 15% had submitted a paper obtained in large part from a term paper mill or website
• 52% had copied a few sentences from a website w/o citing the source
• over 45% admitted to collaborating inappropriately with others on assignments

In a sample of 1,800 students at nine state universities:

• 70% of the students admitted to cheating on exams
• 84% admitted to cheating on written assignments
• 52% had copied a few sentences from a website w/o citing the source

http://www.caveon.com/resources/cheating-statistics/

A Cheating Crisis in America's Schools- news report

Angelo Angelis, a professor at Hunter College in New York City, was recently grading some student papers on the story of Paul Revere when he noticed something strange.

A certain passage kept appearing in his students' work, he said.

It went like this, Angelis told Primetime's Charles Gibson: "Paul Revere would never have said, 'The British are coming, the British are coming,' he was in fact himself British, he would have said something like, 'the Red Coats are coming.' "

Angelis typed the words into Google, and found the passage on one Web site by a fifth-grade class. Half a dozen of his college students had copied their work from a bunch of elementary school kids, he thought.

The Web site was very well done, Angelis said. For fifth graders, he would give them an "A." But his college students deserved an "F".

Lifting papers off the Internet is one of the newer trends in plagiarism — and technology is giving students even more ways to cheat nowadays.

Authoritative numbers are hard to come by, but according to a 2002 confidential survey of 12,000 high school students, 74 percent admitted cheating on an examination at least once in the past year.

In a six-month investigation, Primetime traveled to colleges and high schools across the country to see how students are cheating, and why. The bottom line is not just that many students have more temptation — but they seem to have a whole new mindset.

Get Real

Joe is a student at a top college in the Northeast who admits to cheating regularly. Like all of the college students who spoke to Primetime, he wanted his identity obscured.

In Joe's view, he's just doing what the rest of the world does.

"The real world is terrible," he told Gibson. "People will take other people's materials and pass it on as theirs. I'm numb to it already. I'll cheat to get by."

Primetime heard the same refrain from many other students who cheat: that cheating in school is a dress rehearsal for life. They mentioned President Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal and financial scandals like the Enron case, as well as the inconsistencies of the court system.

"Whether or not you did it or not, if you can get the jury to say that you're not guilty, you're free," said Will, a student at one of the top public high schools in the nation.

Mary, a student at a large university in the South, said, "A lot of people think it's like you're not really there to learn anything. You're just learning to learn the system."

Michael Josephson, founder of the Josephson Institute for Ethics, the Los Angeles-based organization that conducted the 2002 survey, said students take their lead from adults.

"They're basically decent kids whose values are being totally corrupted by a world which is sanctioning stuff that even they know is wrong. But they can't understand why everybody allows it."

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132376

 

Discussion:

-What percent of students surveyed admitted to cheating?  Do you think that is the same percent for students who cheat at our school?

-Why is cheating/ plagiarism wrong?

-Who does cheating ultimately hurt?

-Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? "..you're not really there to learn anything.  You're just learning to learn the system."

Integrity

"Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not."

-Oprah Winfrey

Integrity-a movie clip

Show the following video clip: http://www.wingclips.com/movie-clips/courageous/job-is-yours

What was the employee asked to do that was dishonest?
Why did he refuse to do it?
Do you have friends that would encourage you to make good choices?
What is your motivation for making good choices?
Do you have the strength to do what is right no matter what the consequence is?
What did Jose think was going to happen to him when he told his boss "no"?
How was Jose rewarded for his choice?
People are always watching to see what choices you are going to make?

Integrity Definition

The definition from wikipedia.org is as follows:
Integrity is a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions. Integrity can be regarded as the opposite of hypocrisy,^[1] in that it regards internal consistency as a virtue, and suggests that parties holding apparently conflicting values should account for the discrepancy or alter their beliefs.
The word "integrity" stems from the Latin adjective integer (whole, complete).^[2] In this context, integrity is the inner sense of "wholeness" deriving from qualities such as honesty and consistency of character. As such, one may judge that others "have integrity" to the extent that they act according to the values, beliefs and principles they claim to hold.

Integrity

If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.
Henry Kravis

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Right Choices

Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.
W. Clement Stone

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Power of Words

Be Impeccable With Your Word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
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