Ethical fading essay

“Look at this,” Raymond says, holding up a printout of an online ad for Pennant Hotels. “Concierge is heavily featured. You see the language here. ‘Discreet,’ we call it, because we want guests to feel like they can use Concierge for anything. These ads are all lies now that we know about the bug. What are we going to do?”

You’ve got another difficult problem to solve. Delaying the rollout of Concierge and admitting a mistake will be a serious hit, and the chances of anyone exploiting the bug so quickly are small—but protecting your customers’ data is a worthy goal.

The next step in Being Attentive to explore the values in tension so you can identify the issue you have to resolve. After paying attention and figuring out what’s going on, you evaluated the evidence. While you were being attentive, you used your critical thinking skills to evaluate the facts for truthfulness and credibility (such as how long a fix for the vulnerability will really take). Then, you got as much information as possible about each person’s emotional state (for example, what your marketers and your business partners each want).

These two pieces of information will help you identify exactly what ethical values are in tension with each other. Where is your head in tension with your feelings and passions (rationality versus sensibility)? Where are the rights of individuals in tension with the rights of the community (autonomy versus equality)? Where might your fears or desire to take care of yourself be in tension with the success of the community as a whole?

As you begin to name the tensions in this ethical dilemma, you’ll be able to create a statement that clearly highlights those tensions. This statement is the ethical issue.

As you frame the issue, consider who has access to resources and power as well as the expectations of your role. This dilemma places you in a position of executive leadership, which means you have considerable decision-making power. But, remember, whenever you are making an ethical decision, you have the opportunity to demonstrate leadership and the decision itself has the power to affect a broad range of stakeholders.

Remember, the best statement of the issue will…

• Highlight the tension between two competing values or obligations. You value the privacy of your customers (and their continued business), but you also have a bottom line to consider, which affects everyone in the company you work for.
• Focus on helping everyone be as ethical as possible instead of just taking care of yourself. The problem you face is entirely the fault of your business partner, AI Innovators. They created Concierge, and they’re responsible for its bugs. You could throw them under the bus, or you could help.
• Avoid focusing on a specific course of action. Choosing exactly what you’re going to do too early defeats the purpose of analysis.
• Avoid focusing on yourself to avoid an unpleasant outcome. Being ethically mature involves considering the expectations of all of the people involved, even if you face some risksYou assure Raymond that you’re aware of the issue and that you and Winston are working together for a solution. He seems less than reassured. “We’re going to look like idiots either way,” he says. “Remember that big deal Winston made about how we’re behind the EU’s ‘Privacy Shield.’ Not so much now.” We now know that the issue is how to meet the customers’ expectations for your product while also advancing your company’s strategic initiatives. You may think that only your company and your customers are involved. However, if you think a bit, you’ll realize that other people have a stake in this situation as well.

  Every ethical dilemma involves more than just you and one other person. In ethical decision making, we call people who may be affected by your decision stakeholders.

  As you’re Being Intelligent, you’ll consider the people involved in the dilemma and determine who’ll be affected by your decision. Expanding your circle of concern and consideration allows you to make your decision intelligently, as you’ll have a greater understanding of the potential consequences.

  Remember, ethical dilemmas have two kinds of stakeholders. Primary stakeholders are those who:

  • have to take action or are directly involved in this situation, such as the decision-makers;
  • will be significantly impacted by your action, such as people who could lose money based on your choice; or
  • have interests that should be protected, like those whose privacy is at stake.

  Secondary stakeholders are those who:

  • are so far removed from the situation that you don’t have to worry about them;
  • have delegated responsibility to others; or
  • are interested observers but don’t have any real involvement in the situation
• Soon after Raymond leaves your office, you’re on the phone with your counterpart at AI Innovators. Hera, AI Innovators’ CEO, is also on the call. You’re discussing options for rolling out the update once AI Innovators has identified the bug. “I don’t think we should make a big announcement,” Hera says. “Yes, we screwed up. No question. But we’re fixing the problem and we didn’t do anything with the data we accidentally kept. Let’s just focus on what we know we have to do first, the minimum to comply with the law and so forth.”

  Now that we’ve identified the issue and determined the stakeholders, let’s start looking at the problem through the next ethical perspective, the Relationship Lens.

  People who use the Relationship Lens to solve their ethical puzzles use their reason to set them in the right direction. However, unlike the Responsibilities Lens, which focuses on duties, the Relationship Lens focuses on being fair. Being fair also means that we use our power appropriately. How do we, as members of a community, make sure that those without power or resources are considered?

  The first step in determining what is fair is to discern what rights we can claim as a member of a community. People often assert that they have a right to this or that. The question that’s often not answered is who is supposed to pay for that right.

  The Relationship Lens gives us a way to sort through the problem. The first step is to decide what kinds of things everyone has a right to, regardless of their ability to pay. These rights are called basic liberties or negative rights because they tend to be very important but not very expensive for a community to provide.

  Consider the stakes in your dilemma: you are overseeing the early stages of a launch of a service in your company’s hotels that hasn’t worked as promised. During the time before the error was discovered, customers had no control over their personal data. Do your customers have a basic right to have total control over every piece of information they entrust to a network? Or, is that right instead better expressed as right to the protection of laws and potential restitution in the event that hacking occurs? Consider these distinctions carefully as you answer.

  One common list of basic liberties is as follows:

  • Right to notice:
    To know what the rules are and what the process for enforcing them is.
  • Right to voice:
    To share concerns and critiques about the rules, process, and possible outcomes. Each stakeholder or a representative from the group is entitled to a seat at the table where decisions are being made. The right to voice does not include the right to veto the decision.
  • Right to have contracts honored:
    To have the terms of a contract honored once an agreement is made and not to have those terms changed on a whim.

  Notice how very limited the list is. Notice also that tangible items—like a guaranteed amount of health care, education, housing, or other “stuff”—are not on the list. Those rights are called positive rights because providing the same amount to everyone requires extensive redistribution of resources in the community. How to fairly provide access to the goods that aren’t evenly divided among all the members of the community is considered.

• “Whatever we do,” Hera says as your conference call continues, “you’re going to have unhappy customers on your hands. Our company will fix our mistake, but we’ll leave the decision on messaging up to your company. You and your marketing team need to choose how to inform your customers and what information to leave out. We’ll accept your decision, even if you want to put the blame on us. The mistake is ours, after all. But we’ll determine how the error gets fixed. We’re not going to let you poke around in our code.”

  People become confused about basic liberties—rights that are equally distributed—and other “rights” where people get various amounts, like education or health care. A difficult question for a community is how much of a given good each member of the community should have, regardless of their ability to pay.

  To help us answer this question, we identify the least advantaged stakeholder. Then, we can use a balancing process to see how many resources the community should share with them (generally through paying taxes or charity) in to give that stakeholder a fighting chance. For example, because education is so essential for success, we’re willing to use our tax dollars to pay for it.

  On the previous screen you identified the following basic liberties:

  • Conference organizers right to expect that Concierges will be available for the attendees or that they will be compensated.
  • AI Innovators’ right to have a say in how the bug in their product is fixed.
  • Customers’ right to know if Concierge’s privacy features aren’t actually working to safeguard their personal data.

  The next step of the process is to identify the least advantaged and the most advantaged stakeholders. Here, we consider how resources and power should be allocated. Those who are low on resources or who are at the mercy of others are the least advantaged. The least advantaged may be a large group, but power is about more than strength of numbers.

  For the purposes of this lens, advantage consists of access to knowledge, power, and financial resources. Remember to keep this analysis specific—you are not adding up the total knowledge or authority that a stakeholder has, only the knowledge or authority that they have in this situation. The power at stake in this dilemma is information. Your knowledge of the vulnerability in Concierge is power you possess that Pennant’s customers, currently, do not. You can change the allocation of that power.Winston comes into your office looking for an update. “Any suggestions?” he asks. “What’s your first thought about a solution given where we are now?”

• “Not bad,” Winston says when he hears your initial suggestion. “But I want to make absolutely sure that our response considers our company’s reputation. I recently made some very particular claims about our compliance with EU privacy laws, and I’m about to look very foolish. How do you think we can show that our company still has character, that we can be trusted?”

  We’re almost done! The final lens we are going to examine is the Reputation Lens, which focuses on virtues, commendable ethical qualities embodied by people in our community. As we seek to live into the qualities of these virtues, we define the ethical responsibilities of our role as well as shape our personal character.

  The Reputation Lens defines our place and purpose in the community as our role. One of our most important roles is our profession, but roles such as “parent” or “citizen” or “friend” may take priority for us depending on the situation. Each role carries with it certain expectations from the community, competencies that we expect members of that role to have.

  Each person expresses the common virtues of our community slightly differently. This variation means that each of us carries out our role within an organization in a somewhat different fashion. In the process, we bring a special blend of skills and abilities to the organization. In addition, each profession emphasizes certain key virtues to meet the ethical requirements of a specific professional responsibility.

  Given that your role for this ethical dilemma is Chief Technology Officer, the first concern of this lens is identifying the core competencies and virtues of that particular role as defined by your community. In defining your role, you have three sets of complementary competencies.

  • Technical skills: The technical skill set is comprised of the specific tasks you should be able to do in your professional role. As you progress in your profession, you are expected to continue to hone your technical skills.
  • Ethical virtues: As we intentionally choose to live an ethical life, the virtues, or ethical competencies, become habitual and define who we are as a professional and as a person. Different professions have various expectations for virtues. Your role in this dilemma is that of an executive, a leader in your company. That role carries with it certain expectations from the company’s community of employees. In the Reputation Lens, leaders are servants—they serve the people they lead by adhering to ethical virtues.
  • Personal preferences: Each of us is a unique human being and brings our own gifts and talents to our community. Our personal preferences can be honored as long as they don’t interfere with getting our job done or living into our ethical obligations.

  As professionals, we have two tasks: to be technically competent and ethically sound. People often behave unethically when they forget that the ethical competencies of a profession, the virtues, are just as important as the technical competencies.

  Ethical fading is the term for reducing every decision to a professional decision instead of noticing that we have ethical obligations as well. So, the first step in decision making for the Reputation Lens is making sure that we know the difference among technical competencies, ethical virtues, and our personal preferences
  
  In this lens, we identified the basic liberties entitled to our community:

  • Conference organizers right to expect that Concierges will be available for the attendees or that they will be compensated.
  • AI Innovators’ right to have a say in how the bug in their product is fixed.
  • Customers’ right to know if Concierge’s privacy features aren’t actually working to safeguard their personal data.

  We also identified the most and least advantaged stakeholders:

  • Hera Giannopoulos, CEO of AI Innovators
  • Attendees and organizers of the CHRP conference
• As you come to the end of the process, you’ve made the following decision:
  

  To live into the virtue of excellent customer service, give the organizers of the conference the opportunity to opt out of using the feature and receive a credit on their contract because the feature is not available. Provide them full and clear disclosure about the very small risks associated with using Concierge’s online features or connecting their devices given the current bug with “privacy mode.”