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Discussion 1Unethical 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 admission
to a selective college or who has been interviewed for a
highly desired job knows the feeling of waiting impatiently
to learn the result of one’s application. So it’s not hard to
identify with those applicants to some of the nation’s most
prestigious MBA programs who thought they had a chance
to get an early glimpse at whether their ambition was to be
fulfilled. While visiting a Businessweek Online message
board, they found instructions, posted by an anonymous
hacker, explaining how to find out what admission decision
the business schools had made in their case. Doing so wasn’t
hard. The universities in question—Harvard, Dartmouth,
Duke, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford—used the same
application software from Apply Yourself, Inc. Essentially, all
CASE 2.1
Hacking into Harvard
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72 part one moral philosophy and business
one had to do was change the very end of the applicantspecific
URL to get to the supposedly restricted page containing
the verdict on one’s application. In the nine hours it took
Apply Yourself programmers to patch the security flaw after
it was posted, curiosity got the better of about two hundred
applicants, who couldn’t resist the temptation to discover
whether they had been admitted.19
Some of them got only blank screens. But others learned
that they had been tentatively accepted or tentatively
rejected. What they didn’t count on, however, were two
things: first, that it wouldn’t take the business schools long to
learn what had happened and who had done it and, second,
that the schools in question were going to be very unhappy
about it. Harvard was perhaps the most outspoken. Kim B.
Clark, dean of the business school, said, “This behavior is
unethical at best—a serious breach of trust that cannot be
countered 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 also
contrary to the behavior we expect of leaders we aspire to
develop.”
It didn’t take Harvard long to make up its mind what to do
about it. It rejected all 119 applicants who had attempted to
access the information. In an official statement, Dean Clark
wrote that the mission of the Harvard Business School “is to
educate principled leaders who make a difference in the
world. To achieve that, a person must have many skills and
qualities, including the highest standards of integrity, sound
judgment and a strong moral compass—an intuitive sense of
what is right and wrong. Those who have hacked into this
web site have failed to pass that test.” Carnegie Mellon and
MIT quickly followed suit. By rejecting the ethically challenged,
said Richard L. Schmalensee, dean of MIT’s Sloan
School of Management, the schools are trying to “send a
message to society as a whole that we are attempting to
produce people that when they go out into the world, they will
behave ethically.”
Duke and Dartmouth, where only a handful of students
gained access to their files, said they would take a case-bycase
approach and didn’t publicly announce their individualized
determinations. But, given the competition for places in
their MBA programs, it’s a safe bet that few, if any, offending
applicants were sitting in classrooms the following semester.
Forty-two applicants attempted to learn their results early at
Stanford, which took a different tack. It invited the accused
hackers to explain themselves in writing. “In the best case,
what has been demonstrated here is a lack of judgment; in
the worst case, a lack of integrity,” said Derrick Bolton,
Stanford’s director of MBA admissions. “One of the things we
try to teach at business schools is making good decisions
and taking responsibility for your actions.” Six weeks later,
however, the dean of Stanford Business School, Robert Joss,
reported, “None of those who gained unauthorized access
was able to explain his or her actions to our satisfaction.” He
added that he hoped the applicants “might learn from their
experience.”
Given the public’s concern over the wave of corporate
scandals in recent years and its growing interest in corporate
social responsibility, business writers and other media commentators
warmly welcomed Harvard’s decisive response.
But soon there was some sniping at the decision by those
claiming that Harvard and the other business schools had
overreacted. Although 70 percent of Harvard’s MBA students
approved the decision, the undergraduate student newspaper,
The Crimson, was skeptical. “HBS [Harvard Business
School] has scored a media victory with its hard-line stance,”
it said in an editorial. “Americans have been looking for a sign
from the business community, particularly its leading educational
institutions, that business ethics are a priority. HBS’s
false bravado has given them one, leaving 119 victims in
angry hands.”
As some critics pointed out, Harvard’s stance overlooked
the possibility that the hacker might have been a spouse or a
parent who had access to the applicant’s password and personal
identification number. In fact, one applicant said that
this had happened to him. His wife found the instructions at
Businessweek Online and tried to check on the success of
his application. “I’m really distraught over this,” he said. “My
wife is tearing her hair out.” To this, Harvard’s Dean Clark
responds, “We expect applicants to be personally responsible
for the access to the website, and for the identification and
passwords they receive.”
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chapter two Normative Theories of Ethics 73
Critics also reject the idea that the offending applicants
were “hackers.” After all, they used their own personal identification
and passwords to log on legitimately; all they did was
to modify the URL to go to a different page. They couldn’t
change anything in their files or view anyone else’s information.
In fact, some critics blamed the business schools and
Apply Yourself more than they did the applicants. If those
pages were supposed to be restricted, then it shouldn’t have
been so easy to find one’s way to them.
In an interview, one of the Harvard applicants said that
although he now sees that what he did was wrong, he wasn’t
thinking about that at the time—he just followed the hacker’s
posted instructions out of curiosity. He didn’t consider what
he did to be “hacking,” because any novice could have done
the same thing. “I’m not an IT person by any stretch of the
imagination,” he said. “I’m not even a great typist.” He wrote
the university a letter of apology. “I admitted that I got curious
and had a lapse in judgment,” he said. “I pointed out that I
wasn’t trying to harm anyone and wasn’t trying to get an
advantage over anyone.” Another applicant said that he knew
he had made a poor judgment but he was offended by having
his ethics called into question. “I had no idea that they would
have considered this a big deal.” And some of those posting
messages at Businessweek Online and other MBA-related
sites 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 and
MIT’s automatically rejecting everyone who peeked “because
it wasn’t an impulsive mistake.” “The instructions are reasonably
elaborate,” he said. “You didn’t need a degree in computer
science, but this clearly involved effort. You couldn’t do
this casually without knowing that you were doing something
wrong. We’ve always taken ethics seriously, and this is a serious
matter.” To those applicants who say that they didn’t do
any harm, Schmalensee replies, “Is there nothing wrong with
going through files just because you can?”
To him and others, seeking unauthorized access to
restricted pages is as wrong as snooping through your
boss’s desk to see whether you’ve been recommended
for a raise. Some commentators, however, suggest there
may be a generation gap here. Students who grew up
with the Internet, they say, tend to see it as wide-open
territory and don’t view this level of web snooping as
indicating a character flaw.
Discussion Questions
1. Suppose that you had been one of the MBA applicants
who stumbled across an opportunity to learn your results
early. What would you have done, and why? Would you
have considered it a moral decision? If so, on what basis
would you have made it?
2. Assess the morality of what the curious applicants did
from the point of view of egoism, utilitarianism, Kant’s
ethics, Ross’s pluralism, and rule utilitarianism.
3. In your view, was it wrong for the MBA applicants to take
an unauthorized peek at their application files? Explain why
you consider what they did morally permissible or impermissible.
What obligations, ideals, and effects should the
applicants have considered? Do you think, as some have
suggested, that there is a generation gap on this issue?
4. Did Harvard and MIT overreact, or was it necessary for
them to respond as they did in order to send a strong
message about the importance of ethics? If you were a
business-school admissions official, how would you have
handled this situation?
5. Assess the argument that the applicants who snooped
were just engaging in the type of bold and aggressive
behavior 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 of
the universities for not having more secure procedures,
not the fault of the applicants who took advantage of
that fact?
6. One of the applicants admits that he used poor judgment
but believes that his ethics should not be questioned.
What do you think he means? If he exercised
poor judgment on a question of right and wrong, isn’t
that a matter of his ethics? Stanford’s Derrick Bolton
distinguishes between a lapse of judgment and a
lack of integrity. What do you see as the difference?
Based on this episode, what, if anything, can we say
about the ethics and the character of the curious
applicants?
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