Rachel Patmore’s Updates
Assignment 8
Imagining doing business with a group of people who see privacy from a vastly different perspective than I do, I would first determine what their rationale is for holding their perspective. The hypothetical is difficult to answer, because there are so many possibilities of perspectives that can be held by myself as well as the group of people that I am doing business with. In business ethics, “business persons are advised that when in Rome they ought do as the Romans do—as in etiquette, so too in ethics. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 4.0).” However, this posture may lead to morally repugnant practices. The question must then be raised, “under what conditions ‘everyone's doing it’ is a moral justification? (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 4.0).” An example of this would be, if I were doing business with a country where it was standard practice to remit data to the government without knowledge or consent of the users. Though it has happened in the US, most would consider this ethically wrong, even if it was the standard in the country that I was doing business with. I would probably try to respectfully negotiate with the company. If I were unable to make progress through negotiations; I would try to ensure that all users of the software were fully aware of the privacy policy.
This is true, and assimilating ones code to match another is using something as a mean and not an end, which would be against virtue ethics. Tricky grey area
What is confusing about that, is that it is the 'everyone's doing it’ is a moral justification; it seems like this could lead to very unethical actions. I understand not wanting to be ethnocentric when dealing in international business, but there must be a limit to how much one will forsake their own ethical parameters.
Tying back into virtue ethics, things get tricky when the ones around you operate to a different moral code than yourself. Sometimes you have to just assimilate