Ethical Dilemmas

Dilemma #1

• On a recent flight, my colleague was seated next to an employee of our major competitor. My colleague realized this when the fellow began writing e-mails about possible problems with a significant new product. Is it ethical for us to capitalize on this fellow’s stupidity?

• Imagine that instead of an oblivious competitor, your colleague sits next to an oblivious doctor who is foolishly writing in her patients’ charts without obscuring their names. Tempting as it might be to peek, your colleague should restrain himself — to protect not the doctor but her patients, whose privacy is being jeopardized without their knowledge.

• Even if your colleague’s seatmate is only writing in her diary — jeopardizing no one’s privacy but her own — he would be wrong to read over her shoulder. Airline travel is unpleasant enough already; it would be excruciating if we didn’t afford one another some minimal zone of privacy.

• Business communications, however, are different from a diary. Companies vying for the same customers are engaged in explicit, mutual, ongoing competition. They are not just allowed to peek over their rival’s shoulder, metaphorically speaking; they are also supposed to. Not trying would be irresponsible.

• There are limits to what that mandate can justify, of course. From a legal perspective, stealing trade secrets — say, hacking into a competitor’s encrypted e-mails — is out of bounds. But according to Susan J. Kohlmann, a partner at Jenner & Block L.L.P. who specializes in intellectual property law, it doesn’t count as a trade secret if it’s left out in the open. “The law would say one cannot put the burden on someone who happens on the information inadvertently,” she explains. You can’t sue someone for overhearing what you say in a crowded elevator.

• So how secret is secret? If I’m in a public setting but speaking softly enough that you have to crank up your hearing aid to eavesdrop, does that count? What about if the laptop I write on is visible not from the next seat on an airplane, but from the sidewalk outside my bedroom window? What if it’s only visible with binoculars? Legally, Ms. Kohlmann says, there is no simple rule to decide what constitutes a reasonable precaution.

• Ethically, the question might focus instead on what constitutes reasonable curiosity. Human beings are inquisitive. We are attracted to glowing screens. And we get bored on planes. If the guy sitting next to you is foolish enough to leave sensitive business information out in the open like that, without thinking about who might be sitting next to him, then he has actively handed the competition a great and rare advantage. There is no shame in taking it.

• All of which leads me to one nagging question: a close competitor, sitting right next to your colleague, flashing sensitive information right in front of his face — are you sure he wasn’t trying to fake you guys out?

Dilemma #2

• A co-worker of mine saw a van plow into two parked cars. She wrote down the license plate number as the van drove away, but when she pulled up alongside it, she recognized the driver — a known criminal in her neighborhood who is always armed and has a very bad reputation. They made eye contact, and he knows that she saw the accident. Is it her responsibility to get involved with this dangerous man?

• It’s not her responsibility to put her life at risk on behalf of someone’s car door. Let me put that a little more bluntly: Nobody should put their life at risk on behalf of someone’s car door, nor on behalf of any other replaceable, repairable and for heaven’s sake insurable object. It would be different if your co-worker saw the guy beating someone up; but if he merely beat up a car or two, then confronting someone she believes to be armed would be not valiant but foolish.

• The problem is that this sensible calculation, multiplied by however many neighbors, produces the situation in which your co-worker now finds herself: a scary man acts with impunity, while everyone else is left to tremble in fear and wait for him to really hurt someone. If the situation is to change, and if the police aren’t intervening, she has to find some alternative to either sticking her neck out or sticking her head in the sand.

• As bad as it is to damage other people’s property, damaging their sense of security — scaring them into silence — is by far the guy’s worse ethical offense. So she should fight back on that front, by finding strength in consensus.

• If this man really is an armed menace (and not just someone with “a very bad reputation”), your co-worker and her neighbors need to agree that next time he strikes, they will go to the police together and speak with one voice. Communities have the right — and to some lesser degree, the power — to articulate and enforce standards on such basic issues as violence and intimidation. Once her neighbors show they do not fear this guy, he may be canny enough to start fearing them.

Dilemma #3

• I work for a small retail company that is on the verge of going under. Some suppliers have already cut us off for nonpayment. The owner has asked me to place large orders with our remaining vendors, to buy some time to turn the company around. I think it’s more likely that these vendors (many of whom are sole proprietors or small businesses themselves) will never be paid. Placing those orders without telling the vendors about our situation isn’t illegal, but I think it’s unethical. What should I do?

• You could pick up the phone, call your vendors and give them a big song and dance about all the great things happening in your company — some major expansion you have planned or your boss’s brilliant insights. You could, that is to say, lie.

• Or you could call them and tell them not to accept your business under any circumstances. Your vendors would thank you for your candor, wish you all the best and never do business with you again. And that would be that: your company, with nothing to sell, would indeed go under.

• Neither course would be ethical.

• Flat-out lying might protect you and your co-workers for a while, but it would endanger your vendors and their employees. Loyalty to friends and colleagues is a fine thing, but not at such a high cost to others, especially to those with whom you have a relationship of trust.

• Meanwhile, the oversharing strategy, if we should call it that, suggests great concern for your vendors or their employees, but it betrays your own colleagues, who might be working hard to help find a solution to your collective problems. Many companies that at one point or another seemed doomed went on to lead long and financially responsible lives. Is it possible your boss has a rescue plan he hasn’t yet chosen to share with you?

• Every business interaction involves some risk; between the day an invoice is issued and the day it comes due, even the surest-seeming company can go under, including, as we now know, those once deemed too big to fail. Presumably your vendors know that and make appropriate allowances for the occasional loss. Trying to prevent them from taking even a calculated risk is taking a virtuous impulse to a foolhardy extreme.

• So how can you strike the balance between saying too little and saying too much? The standard should be transparency.

• Your vendors owe it to their employees and investors to figure out if their customers are good risks or bad — and to take appropriate precautions, like asking for a down payment, if they have reason to doubt you. Your duty, when they ask hard questions, is to reply truthfully.

• If you believe that your boss has no intention of paying, or that there is no chance he’d be able to pay, then don’t place the order; you’d just be helping him steal.

• But if you think he’s honestly, though feebly, trying to keep the business afloat, and if the arrival of some additional merchandise might help keep the lights on a while longer, then you can let your vendors decide whether the potential revenue is worth it to them. Just be honest. It might really be that simple.

Dilemma #4

• I bought a house that a previous owner had nearly destroyed. He knocked holes in walls and doors, trucked away the deck and trashed the aboveground pool, etc. I assumed he was angry at his wife, but it turned out that he was angry at the bank, which had foreclosed, taking everything the couple had put into the property.

• When a mutual friend invited the former owners to visit, the wife wept and said she could never bear to see our improvements on a house that had been “stolen.” I know we didn’t steal her home, but I resolved never to buy a foreclosed house again. It seems to be an evil thing to do, to profit from another family’s misfortune. Is it?

Dilemma #5

• My daughter loves her preschool. So do my wife and I: It’s affordable, it’s on our way to work and it teaches Mandarin, her second language. Recently, the school’s co-owner and director was indicted for stealing a ton of money meant to feed low-income children at her other business.

• I wouldn’t be shocked if the charges stick. How do my ethical obligations not to support a (supposed) crook square with my daughter’s love of the school and its teachers, especially given the lack of equivalent options?

• Were your dentist or dry cleaner indicted, you might not think twice before switching to someone you felt more comfortable interacting with. But switching schools is not such a simple matter. Especially not in New York, where in hopes of finding one spot at a suitable program, some anxious families apply to as many as 10 preschools at a time. Anyway, leaving wouldn’t be simple, because your daughter wants to stay.

• If by paying her tuition, you facilitate this woman’s crimes, then no question, you’ve got to go. Same holds if the facilities your daughter so enjoys are being paid for with stolen money.

• But if the school is not implicated in the woman’s supposed crimes, though, a number of factors argue for staying. First, she’s innocent until proven guilty. Even if that status changes, she presumably won’t run the school from behind bars; the more students who withdraw now, the more likely that their beloved teachers will end up with pink slips instead of a smooth transition to new leadership. That wouldn’t further the interests of justice.

• The problem is that you seem to think, however prejudicially, that the director did it. One of the most basic functions a school can serve is to help kids learn to think — for themselves — about the ethical building blocks of right and wrong. If you don’t even trust this woman not to take food from a poor child’s mouth, you shouldn’t trust her to imbue the school, and your child, with sound values. Unless a new director is on the way, the very factor that makes it hard to leave the school — namely, the eagerness with which your daughter attends to its lessons — also makes it so important to leave.

Dilemma #6

• I believe that my name is on a Transportation Security Administration watch list. Often when I fly, the letters “SSSS” on my boarding pass alert gate agents to pull me aside for extra screening. But on a recent trip, a T.S.A. employee failed to notice the “SSSS.” I’m fairly certain that I am on the T.S.A. list because of my animal rights activism. I am not a threat to civil aviation. I was happy to avoid yet another bothersome search, but should I have spoken up? I wouldn’t want the guy to miss an actual threat.

• Despite posing no danger to air safety, you feel you are treated like a potential shoe-bomber, singled out for even more hassles than the average flier. Yet your concern is not how to escape this surveillance but how to increase it.

• That is a most unusual response. If no airline has yet rewarded your loyal patriotism with an upgrade, it might be time to demand one.

• As a practical matter, you have no legal obligation to do as you propose. Deliberately circumventing airport security can be a crime. Getting off easy isn’t. So you broke no law — a boring point, perhaps, but one worth making in a realm where the wrong move, or even an ill-advised joke, can land you in handcuffs.

• The ethical question is more intriguing. Beyond merely obeying T.S.A. procedures, your obligation to aid their enforcement depends in large part on whether you think them just. Despite your own experience, you seem to have no doubts about the underlying validity of a watch list (which is compiled by the F.B.I., not the T.S.A.) or its ability to protect innocent people. If you feel the system is helping you, it is fitting that you should help the system. But how?

• In some studies, screeners, their eyes perhaps glazed over from so many black wheelie suitcases, have missed a high percentage of decoy weapons. Calling your screener’s — or perhaps his supervisor’s — attention to his lapse could help startle him back into focus.

• False negatives are, however, only one kind of security risk. False positives, of which you claim to be an example, pose their own dangers. The more law-abiding people who are flagged in error, the more attention is diverted from dangerous people. So what’s more ethical: to persuade a screener to spend more time on you? Or let him move on to someone scary?

• Before you answer, it might be worth considering the ethics of the watch list itself. Many have questioned its fairness, a concern that the T.S.A. has tried to address with its new Secure Flight program. Others have questioned the wisdom of tipping off the bad guys with those four visible S’s. Preventing terrorism is an ethical goal, but an ethical goal does not necessarily ensure an ethical policy

• By the way, are you sure you’re really on the list? The T.S.A. won’t confirm anyone’s status. It won’t even confirm a connection between the list and those four S’s. So maybe you’re not on the F.B.I.’s radar at all. And as for all those enhanced screenings, well, maybe the screeners just like you.

Dilemma #7

• Is it piracy if you take your laptop into a library and download CD’s or copy movies from its DVD collection? I travel the country continuously and frequent libraries. Never have I seen a sign that prohibits copying the material on their shelves. Adam Wasserman,Los Angeles

• I, too, frequent libraries, and never have I seen a sign that prohibits shooting a patron who jabbers into his cellphone in the reference section, but I don’t take that lacuna as permission to open fire. While libraries exist to lend just the sort of material you describe, duplicating an entire copyrighted work is forbidden.

• Siva Vaidhyanathan, an expert on intellectual-property issues who teaches at New York University, explains that copying an excerpt for educational, research, artistic or journalistic purposes is generally legal, “but copying an entire book or film would usually lie beyond any fair use of copyrighted material.” That is, downloading a few moments of “Tear the Roof off the Sucker (Give Up the Funk)” for nonprofit scholarly purposes is fine; duplicating all of “Mothership Connection,” the Parliament album on which that splendid song is found, to save yourself the cost of buying it, is not. In judging such conduct, both motive and size count.

• This guideline strives to balance the right of a creator to be paid for his work (and thus encourage his creativity) and the interest of the larger society in the dissemination of ideas. The fundamental goal of copyright is not to secure profits but to inspire thought — “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” as Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution puts it.

• Although copying an entire work is seldom legal, it is sometimes ethical — for example, if the work is unavailable for purchase (most books ever published are now out of print); if it is available only in an archaic format (a 78-r.p.m. recording, a Betamax tape, a claytablet); if you already own a copy and want another in a more usable format (less scratchy, fewer coffee stains). But such reasonable situations might not inoculate you against lawsuits. The law is an expression not just of ethics but of power.

Dilemma #8

• My 90-year-old mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, entered a nursing home. Her written instructions clearly directed that should she face extreme disability with no expectation of recovery, she should “not be kept alive by medications, including nutrition and hydration of any kind, artificial or otherwise.” When she contracted a urinary tract infection, her doctor treated it with antibiotics and, since she was dehydrated, intravenous hydration. The doctor thought this a proper response to a curable condition unrelated to her primary disease, and I consented. Were we right? Mark Linder, Brooklyn

• You responded honorably to something that could be treated and from which your mother could be expected to recover. A professor at Yale’s medical school agrees that such an infection is “uncomfortable but unlikely to be life-threatening if simple, noninvasive steps are taken.” Similarly, he adds, if your mother had a minor cut, he would not “let her bleed to death rather than dress it.”

• Eventually it may be just such an infection that proves fatal to an elderly person, but until your mother contracts one requiring extraordinary and invasive treatment, to behave as you did respects her instructions in letter and in spirit.

• UPDATE: A short time after this, Linder’s mother began refusing food, drink and medications. She died two weeks later.