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Southern New Hampshire University *

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210

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Philosophy

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Jan 9, 2024

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docx

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Uploaded by MasterBarracudaMaster958

Charisma Johnson Business Ethics Fall 2020 October 12, 2020 What is Ethics to you? Word Count: 1806 Word & Quote Count: 1810 & 2 What does ethics mean to you? When I think about ethics, I think about how you are supposed to do the right thing when there is a situation presented to you. There is always going to be one way that you would like to react but there is always going to be an ethical way. Applying for college is a very stressful situation, wondering if the college of your dreams is going to admit you for the fall semester. For those students who applied to Harvard, Dartmouth, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford are no different. They too were going through a stressful situation, wondering if they were going to be selected into the programs of their choice. It is not unusual for one to become curious about their acceptance and when presented with an opportunity to see theirs early, take it. However, ethically those students would choose to wait for their results and not breach any type of protocol. Some might assume that the duties of a business-school admissions official may not be as difficult of a job as it really is. Those officials are to carefully look over thousands of student applications and select those they truly feel would be great assets to their programs. I strongly do not feel that Harvard and MIT overreacted when their potential students breached the trust that was instilled within them. The admissions offices hold high standards for their potential students because they are believing that they will act with integrity and show that they can act ethically.

Choosing to reject those students from attending their campus because they chose to not behave ethically is the exact notion that should have be done. Breaching the security whether using their own information and rigging the system to bypass and get to the page they needed to or “hacking” and using someone else’s name to see their results is not ethical. Some may view the deans and the admissions office as not justified to decide in teaching those students a lesson. However, they are certainly justified because they are running an establishment that sends people off into the “real” world and they should be teaching those students how to behave. College and school are not just about learning the materials to pass the class, it is also about building and shaping your character. Applying for college was a stressful time for me, wondering which college I was going to choose to attend. Whether or not I felt I had the right grades to even be applying for that specific college in the first place. When I finally decided on what I wanted to do for myself when it came to college, I was nervous. What if I did not get in, what if I did not explore a better option? It was scary, because that is your future and if I had seen an opportunity to see my results early and maybe plan things out a little differently, be ahead of the game – would I have done it? No, as nosey as I am and want to know all the information right then and there, I know that deep down that is wrong and not ethically correct. It is cheating the system and cheating the systems is not how I would have wanted to start or finish my academic career. Yes, a decision like that is most definitely a moral decision. You have to choose between right and wrong, do I do the right thing because that is morally and ethically correct or do I choose to disobey what I know to be moral and cheat the system. I knew that I had to be morally correct and not breach the trust between the university and myself.

There is a many way that this situation could be viewed, you have egoism, utilitarianism, Kant’s ethics, Ross’s pluralism, and rule utilitarianism. To examine the viewpoint in egoism is the say that for a person to breach the moral code then it must be for their own personal agent, their own personal gain. Each student decided that for their own agenda they were going to see if they were accepted into the school of their dreams or not. “Personal egoists claim they should pursue their own best interests, but they do not say what others do. Impersonal egoists claim that everyone should let self-interest guide his or her conduct.” [Shaw, 2017 (pg. 46)]. This act of breaching is done by personal egoists, other students did not persuade their peers to escape their moral and ethical code. They all simply did it for their own personal gain and nobody else’s. When we view this situation through the eye of utilitarianism, you can see that none of the students decided to act on this. To be a utilitarian, you must keep the balance and make sure that the good out ways the bad. By breaching the system and accessing their acceptance or rejected letters, the did not take into consideration those who we be affected by their actions. Thus, they did not keep their peace by being an active utilitarian. Seeing that most of the applicants who breach the server URL and peeked at their admissions determination wrote a letter, we can gather that they knew deep enough that what they did was unethical. They did not need to wait to be told that they were wrong, as soon as an announcement was made about the breach, those students knew within themselves what they had done. “Rule utilitarianism maintains that the utilitarian standard should be applied not to individuals’ actions but moral codes as a whole.” [Shaw, 2017(pg. 69)] Rule utilitarianism can tell us that even though those students decided to breach the system on their own, it affects everyone morally as a whole. That is because their actions fall on to the dean, the admissions office, their peers, their families, etc. They all get affected and must deal with the consequences because the moral code was broken.

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