Discussion 1

Unethical Situations in the Workplace" Please respond to the following:

• Recall a time when you experienced an unethical situation at a work place. What events led up to this situation? Do you think it could have been avoided? Did the company take the right action?

Discussion 2

"Hacking Into Harvard" Please respond to the following:

• Read Case 2.1: Hacking into Harvard, located here or on page 71 in your textbook. As applicants began to defend themselves against the penalties handed out by the business schools, they appealed to both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist criteria to support their actions. Some responded by pointing out that their intentions were never malicious, while others argued they did not think checking their application statuses would cause any real harm. Review the case study and analyze the actions of the students from a Kantian perspective. Consider whether the actions taken by the hackers were permissible according the standard of universal acceptability.

Case 2.1:

Everyone who has ever applied for admissionto a selective college or who has been interviewed for ahighly desired job knows the feeling of waiting impatientlyto learn the result of one’s application. So it’s not hard toidentify with those applicants to some of the nation’s mostprestigious MBA programs who thought they had a chanceto get an early glimpse at whether their ambition was to befulfilled. While visiting a Businessweek Online messageboard, they found instructions, posted by an anonymoushacker, explaining how to find out what admission decisionthe business schools had made in their case. Doing so wasn’thard. The universities in question—Harvard, Dartmouth,Duke, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford—used the sameapplication software from Apply Yourself, Inc. Essentially, allCASE 2.1Hacking into Harvard43075_ch02_ptg01_hr_040-079.indd 71 8/13/12 1:01 PM72 part one moral philosophy and businessone had to do was change the very end of the applicantspecificURL to get to the supposedly restricted page containingthe verdict on one’s application. In the nine hours it tookApply Yourself programmers to patch the security flaw afterit was posted, curiosity got the better of about two hundredapplicants, who couldn’t resist the temptation to discoverwhether they had been admitted.19Some of them got only blank screens. But others learnedthat they had been tentatively accepted or tentativelyrejected. What they didn’t count on, however, were twothings: first, that it wouldn’t take the business schools long tolearn what had happened and who had done it and, second,that the schools in question were going to be very unhappyabout it. Harvard was perhaps the most outspoken. Kim B.Clark, dean of the business school, said, “This behavior isunethical at best—a serious breach of trust that cannot becountered by rationalization.” In a similar vein, Steve Nelson,the executive director of Harvard’s MBA program, stated,“Hacking into a system in this manner is unethical and alsocontrary to the behavior we expect of leaders we aspire todevelop.”It didn’t take Harvard long to make up its mind what to doabout it. It rejected all 119 applicants who had attempted toaccess the information. In an official statement, Dean Clarkwrote that the mission of the Harvard Business School “is toeducate principled leaders who make a difference in theworld. To achieve that, a person must have many skills andqualities, including the highest standards of integrity, soundjudgment and a strong moral compass—an intuitive sense ofwhat is right and wrong. Those who have hacked into thisweb site have failed to pass that test.” Carnegie Mellon andMIT quickly followed suit. By rejecting the ethically challenged,said Richard L. Schmalensee, dean of MIT’s SloanSchool of Management, the schools are trying to “send amessage to society as a whole that we are attempting toproduce people that when they go out into the world, they willbehave ethically.”Duke and Dartmouth, where only a handful of studentsgained access to their files, said they would take a case-bycaseapproach and didn’t publicly announce their individualizeddeterminations. But, given the competition for places intheir MBA programs, it’s a safe bet that few, if any, offendingapplicants were sitting in classrooms the following semester.Forty-two applicants attempted to learn their results early atStanford, which took a different tack. It invited the accusedhackers to explain themselves in writing. “In the best case,what has been demonstrated here is a lack of judgment; inthe worst case, a lack of integrity,” said Derrick Bolton,Stanford’s director of MBA admissions. “One of the things wetry to teach at business schools is making good decisionsand taking responsibility for your actions.” Six weeks later,however, the dean of Stanford Business School, Robert Joss,reported, “None of those who gained unauthorized accesswas able to explain his or her actions to our satisfaction.” Headded that he hoped the applicants “might learn from theirexperience.”Given the public’s concern over the wave of corporatescandals in recent years and its growing interest in corporatesocial responsibility, business writers and other media commentatorswarmly welcomed Harvard’s decisive response.But soon there was some sniping at the decision by thoseclaiming that Harvard and the other business schools hadoverreacted. Although 70 percent of Harvard’s MBA studentsapproved the decision, the undergraduate student newspaper,The Crimson, was skeptical. “HBS [Harvard BusinessSchool] has scored a media victory with its hard-line stance,”it said in an editorial. “Americans have been looking for a signfrom the business community, particularly its leading educationalinstitutions, that business ethics are a priority. HBS’sfalse bravado has given them one, leaving 119 victims inangry hands.”As some critics pointed out, Harvard’s stance overlookedthe possibility that the hacker might have been a spouse or aparent who had access to the applicant’s password and personalidentification number. In fact, one applicant said thatthis had happened to him. His wife found the instructions atBusinessweek Online and tried to check on the success ofhis application. “I’m really distraught over this,” he said. “Mywife is tearing her hair out.” To this, Harvard’s Dean Clarkresponds, “We expect applicants to be personally responsiblefor the access to the website, and for the identification andpasswords they receive.”43075_ch02_ptg01_hr_040-079.indd 72 8/13/12 1:01 PMchapter two Normative Theories of Ethics    73Critics also reject the idea that the offending applicantswere “hackers.” After all, they used their own personal identificationand passwords to log on legitimately; all they did wasto modify the URL to go to a different page. They couldn’tchange anything in their files or view anyone else’s information.In fact, some critics blamed the business schools andApply Yourself more than they did the applicants. If thosepages were supposed to be restricted, then it shouldn’t havebeen so easy to find one’s way to them.In an interview, one of the Harvard applicants said thatalthough he now sees that what he did was wrong, he wasn’tthinking about that at the time—he just followed the hacker’sposted instructions out of curiosity. He didn’t consider whathe did to be “hacking,” because any novice could have donethe same thing. “I’m not an IT person by any stretch of theimagination,” he said. “I’m not even a great typist.” He wrotethe university a letter of apology. “I admitted that I got curiousand had a lapse in judgment,” he said. “I pointed out that Iwasn’t trying to harm anyone and wasn’t trying to get anadvantage over anyone.” Another applicant said that he knewhe had made a poor judgment but he was offended by havinghis ethics called into question. “I had no idea that they wouldhave considered this a big deal.” And some of those postingmessages at Businessweek Online and other MBA-relatedsites believe the offending applicants should be applauded.“Exploiting weaknesses is what good business is all about.Why would they ding you?” wrote one anonymous poster.Dean Schmalensee of MIT, however, defends Harvard andMIT’s automatically rejecting everyone who peeked “becauseit wasn’t an impulsive mistake.” “The instructions are reasonablyelaborate,” he said. “You didn’t need a degree in computerscience, but this clearly involved effort. You couldn’t dothis casually without knowing that you were doing somethingwrong. We’ve always taken ethics seriously, and this is a seriousmatter.” To those applicants who say that they didn’t doany harm, Schmalensee replies, “Is there nothing wrong withgoing through files just because you can?”To him and others, seeking unauthorized access torestricted pages is as wrong as snooping through yourboss’s desk to see whether you’ve been recommendedfor a raise. Some commentators, however, suggest theremay be a generation gap here. Students who grew upwith the Internet, they say, tend to see it as wide-openterritory and don’t view this level of web snooping asindicating a character flaw.Discussion Questions1. Suppose that you had been one of the MBA applicantswho stumbled across an opportunity to learn your resultsearly. What would you have done, and why? Would youhave considered it a moral decision? If so, on what basiswould you have made it?2. Assess the morality of what the curious applicants didfrom the point of view of egoism, utilitarianism, Kant’sethics, Ross’s pluralism, and rule utilitarianism.3. In your view, was it wrong for the MBA applicants to takean unauthorized peek at their application files? Explain whyyou consider what they did morally permissible or impermissible.What obligations, ideals, and effects should theapplicants have considered? Do you think, as some havesuggested, that there is a generation gap on this issue?4. Did Harvard and MIT overreact, or was it necessary forthem to respond as they did in order to send a strongmessage about the importance of ethics? If you were abusiness-school admissions official, how would you havehandled this situation?5. Assess the argument that the applicants who snoopedwere just engaging in the type of bold and aggressivebehavior that makes for business success. In your view,are these applicants likely to make good business leaders?What about the argument that it’s really the fault ofthe universities for not having more secure procedures,not the fault of the applicants who took advantage ofthat fact?6. One of the applicants admits that he used poor judgmentbut believes that his ethics should not be questioned.What do you think he means? If he exercisedpoor judgment on a question of right and wrong, isn’tthat a matter of his ethics? Stanford’s Derrick Boltondistinguishes between a lapse of judgment and alack of integrity. What do you see as the difference?Based on this episode, what, if anything, can we sayabout the ethics and the character of the curiousapplicants?43075_ch02_ptg01_hr_040-079.indd 73 8/13/12 1:01 PM