By STEPHEN A. YODER
The controversy over the release by WikiLeaks of sensitive government documents, and the threat of a release of sensitive documents from a large business organization, gives teachers of business ethics an opportunity to consider the ethics of both the release of the information itself as well as the uses of the release. The faculty members at the UAB School of Business strive for our students to learn how to identify ethical issues and resolve them in a professional manner.
According to Wikipedia -- WikiLeaks' website was difficult to reach at the time this article was written, due to the refusal of U.S. companies like Amazon to allow the organization's website to be hosted on company servers -- WikiLeaks is an international, nonprofit media organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and leaks. WikiLeaks' leaders would likely defend the ethics of their actions on the grounds that the information releases promote greater transparency in society, which in turn promotes more responsibility and accountability among those whose information is exposed.
Such a defense of WikiLeaks' actions is an illustration of one way to reason through an ethical dilemma, by focusing on a particular duty that is motivated by a particular "good," and forge ahead. Examples of duty-based ethical reasoning would include the Ten Commandments and the writings of Hippocrates for early physicians. ("Do no harm.")
But looking at the duty behind an ethical action is by no means the only way that philosophers and, indeed, business and other professionals make ethical decisions. Utilitarians, and those who follow the "golden rule" found in many world religions, would look at the outcome of a decision in addition to the motivations for the decision. Under this analysis, we must take into account, for example, the genuine harm to international relations that might occur from release of confidential diplomatic cables.
Still another way to reach an ethical decision would be Warren Buffett's simple reference to whether you would want your decision to appear on the front page of the newspaper. This method is suspect in the WikiLeaks example, however, because the organization seems to be seeking as much publicity as possible.
The leaks by WikiLeaks have thus far apparently been the result of acts by employees of the organizations whose information is being leaked, rather than any computer hacking by WikiLeaks itself. In the case of the recently leaked State Department documents, the suspected source is a U.S. Army private.
If an internal employee is involved in leaks, this raises the ethical issue of how far an employee should go when he or she suspects wrongdoing by his or her employer. This issue was a topic at a recent panel discussion on ethical decision-making and corporate social responsibility at a UAB School of Business strategic management class. The panelists were Stephen Black, founder of Impact Alabama and director of the University of Alabama Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility; Cathy Wright, principal of Clarus Group; and Linda Flaherty-Goldsmith, an author and higher education consultant and a retired higher education leader.
One student asked the panelists how far an employee, particularly a young employee, should go to "blow the whistle." Flaherty-Goldsmith cautioned students to balance the good to be achieved with the possible negative effects on a career, and to reserve dramatic action for only the most serious perceived problems. Wright noted that most bad ethical decisions are not made by obviously bad people, but rather come disguised simply as tough decisions surrounded by murky information. She noted that those decisions are usually easier to make in an organization that has a values-driven culture.
Resolving a difficult ethical issue is just one example of the type of ambiguity that business managers, like other professionals, must cope with every day. Dealing with ambiguity in a way that benefits society is one reason we bestow the prestige and relatively higher compensation on those who call themselves professionals. Our role as business teachers must be to give our students a variety of tools with which to think about these issues, even if we cannot provide a formula for successful resolution that will apply in all cases. But, as Black told the strategic management students, the standard must be something more than what will keep the decision-maker out of jail.
Stephen A. Yoder is an assistant professor in the School of Business at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. E-mail: syoder@uab.edu.