ETHICAL DILEMMAS
PERSONAL LIFE:
1)
Your
best friend’s spouse made a pass at you, and you suspect that there’s been
infidelity on his/her part in the past.
Your friend, however, is the happiest s/he has ever been. Do you tell your friend what’s going on?
2)
A
man, his wife, mother, and daughter are in a boat. There are no life jackets, and the man is the
only one who can swim. The boat tips
over, and the man can only save one person.
Who should he rescue?
3)
You
are on vacation with your lover and have had the most romantic get-away of your
life. In fact, you’ve both been having
such a good time that your mate literally begs you to call in sick and extend
your vacation a few days longer than planned.
The problem is that your boss has never been fond of you and has made it
clear that he’d love to find a reason to fire you. On the other hand, you’ve been working so
hard over the past year that you’ve had little time for your partner and you
fear that your relationship is failing.
Do you call and lie to your boss?
Or do you disappoint your lover and return home as scheduled?
4)
You
find out from one of your buddies that your spouse of less than a year was in
pornographic films. You are in love with your spouse but disapprove of
pornography. Moreover, s/he wasn’t honest
with you about it, choosing to keep it a secret. What do you do? Do you continue the marriage or dissolve your
partnership?
5)
You
are divorced, and the courts have mandated frequent visitation for your
children with your ex-spouse. Your
children, after the first few visits, beg you not to make them go back because
they’re scared. They tell you that your
ex-spouse is abusing them, but there is no physical evidence to corroborate
their story. You’ve tried to have the
courts insist on supervision during their visits with their other parent, but
they have refused to do so. Do you
continue to send your children for the mandated visitation, or do you refuse
and risk jail time yourself?
6)
You
see your best friend’s spouse having an intimate lunch in an out-of-the-way
place with someone else. It seems clear
to you from their body language and behavior that they are more than
friends. What do you do? Do you tell your friend about it? Do you keep it to yourself and pretend you
never saw? Do you confront the spouse?
Do you call your friend and ask him/her to meet you for a drink so s/he can see
for his/her own eyes?
MEDICINE:
1) When your grandmother was first diagnosed with an incurable cancer, she made you promise not to put her on life support and to make sure she could die at home. When you try to do as she asked, you find that she never made a living will and never put her wishes in writing or spoke to anyone else about them. For the last month or so, she’s been in the hospital because her condition is rapidly deteriorating, and the doctors, with the rest of your family’s consent, have decided to put her on life support. Because she’s been in such severe pain, she’s been on morphine in the hospital’s intensive care unit, which is costing a fortune. Already, the hospital bills are threatening to bankrupt the family, but still they insist she be put on life support even though you’ve told them your grandmother’s wishes. The last time she was fully conscious, upon being checked into the hospital, she asked you to get her back home and to assist her suicide. Do you obey the law or honor your promise?
2) Do you save a premature baby who has only a remote chance of living a healthy, happy life and will most likely accumulate medical bills costing millions of dollars? Or do you refuse medical intervention and let nature take its course?
3)
Your
spouse is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor that makes him/her mentally
ill, and over time s/he becomes totally insane and extremely violent. Your insurance is the only hope your spouse
has of medical treatment. After years of
pain and frustration, you move on with your life and wind up falling in love
with someone else and want to marry him/her.
Do you divorce your first spouse to marry someone else, which will sever
the insurance? Or do you wait for the
first spouse to die?
4)
You
are a doctor. One of your patients dies,
and some members of the family don’t want your patient’s organs to be
donated. On her deathbed, however, your
patient told you that she wanted her organs to be donated, but before you could
get the proper legal documentation, she died.
You have no witnesses and no legal document to prove your patient’s
wishes. You have another patient, a
fifteen-year-old, whose life you could save with your dead patient’s
liver. Do you harvest the liver to
transplant and risk losing your license or do you let her die?
5)
You
are in the race for the cure for cancer.
At a party, a colleague confides in you that she believes your chief
competitor at another institution has discovered a valuable piece of
information. It just so happens that a
post-doctoral position in your lab has recently opened up, and one of your
competitor’s closest assistants has applied for the prestigious position but is
less qualified than many of the other applicants. Do you hire the less qualified applicant
with the hope that you’ll be able to gain access to this valuable piece of
information you wouldn’t otherwise have access to? Or do you hire the most qualified applicant
and hope that you can find the cure without that information?
6)
You
are the young mother with two small boys aged two and four. Since the birth of your younger child, you
have been experiencing bouts of manic depression and hallucinations. Having been diagnosed as bipolar, your
psychiatrist prescribes various drugs, but the side effects are almost as bad
as the affliction: weight gain,
exhaustion, slowed speech and thought, and lack of sexual desire. You have no family to help you raise your
children. Do you put your children in
foster care until you are better, knowing that it will probably be difficult to
reclaim them later, or do you keep them
with you and hope for the best?
EDUCATION:
1)
Your
father is terminally ill and your mother is an alcoholic. You have three young
siblings. You have worked very hard at your education all of your life and have
earned a full scholarship to a prestigious university. Your family, however, has come to rely on you
to get by. If you leave to pursue your
educational goals, not only will your family be destitute, but the family
business will also collapse because you've been holding things together for the
past three years. Should you follow your
life-long dream to become a doctor and leave your family to go off to
school? Or should you forego her
education and continue to help out her family?
2)
Should
everyone have the same right to an education, even if they are disruptive and
interfere with the education of those sharing a classroom with them?
3)
Should
teachers be allowed to strike because of low pay and poor working conditions,
or should they be obliged to keep the system running come hell or high water?
4)
Should
schools “teach to the test” since high scores make the district look good and
allow them to get more funding and better teachers? Or should teachers teach material they feel
is crucial even though it probably won’t be on the state mandated standardized
test (which also means that they will be redirecting their time and energy and
may not get to the material to be tested by the state)?
5)
Should
you pursue your education based on what you are interested and talented in, or
do you “go for the gold” and study that which will get you the highest paying
job?
1)
You
live in
CAREER/FINANCIAL:
1)
You
are a salesperson who has been offered a job making twice the salary you are
making now. The catch is that the offer
depends on your willingness to divulge your list of clients and, in essence,
steal them away from the company that has employed you for the last twenty
years. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t even
consider divulging a client list, but you have two children who will be
entering college soon, and at this point you don’t have enough money to send
them both to college. What should you
do?
2)
You’ve
always been interested in a computer job and are a quick study when it comes to
learning new software. Unfortunately,
you come from a poor family and had to drop out of high school to help out
financially. You’re stuck in a dead-end
job with no prospects for the future. At
work, you overheard your supervisor talking about a computer job that requires
no degree or experience; the only requirement is that you have to be proficient
in some state-of-the-art software that you simply cannot afford. Even though the software company offers an
online sample of the software you need, it only provides limited, short-term
access to the software. Unfortunately,
the online sample simply isn’t sufficient to your need. When you tell your lover about your dilemma,
s/he offers to let you pirate his/her copy from work and promises it won’t be a
problem since there’s no way for anyone to find out. Do you pirate the software?
3)
You
are forty years old and started your own business when you were twenty. For years, you’ve lived too high on the hog
and have gone deeply into debt. The
recent downturn in the economy has diminished your cash flow enormously. Do you try to save the company, sell off all
your luxuries, work off your debt, and sacrifice the next five years of your
life to a meager existence of abject poverty?
Or do you declare bankruptcy, keep your house and many other assets, and
let your creditors absorb the debt?
4)
You
are a defense lawyer who has been appointed by the court to defend a child
molester. Your client has admitted to
the crime and shows absolutely no remorse.
Your intuition tells you that if you get him off, he will continue to
molest children. Your legal vow,
however, is to provide the best defense you can muster. What do you do? Do you defend him to the best of your
ability, which also means that you can get him off on a technicality? Do you quit, hand over the case to a
co-worker you know is incompetent, and thereby sabotage your own career? Or do you intentionally sabotage the case so
that the guilty man will be punished?
Can you think of alternate solutions that would be ethical as well as
feasible?
5)
You
are a single person from a wealthy family.
At work, you are accused of stealing confidential files. You didn’t do it, but you know who did: a single mother with three children. You find out she did it to pay medical
expenses for her youngest daughter who has a chronic health problem, one that
is potentially life threatening if she does not receive an expensive
medication. Unfortunately, your company
does not provide health insurance, so the woman is desperate. Do you turn her in or do you accept the blame
and shoulder the consequences of her actions?
Are there other ethical options that could solve this problem?
6)
In
a parking lot, you find a wallet with megabucks in it. You look around for the person who lost it,
but there’s nobody anywhere around. Do you return it or keep the money?
ENVIRONMENT:
1)
Your
family fortune comes from an oil company that is exploiting workers in a third
world country and is also polluting the rivers, the only source of drinking
water for many natives. This pollution
has directly caused a marked increase in premature death as well as birth
defects. To make matters worse, it is
also killing off the fish, a major source of sustenance for the natives. You are 30 years old and have never really
concerned yourself with the family business.
You’ve lived a life of luxury off of the dividends from these oil
investments. In fact, you’ve spent your
life in blissful ignorance and have never needed to work for a living. You have no college degree and no job
experience. You consider yourself a
moral individual, so when the pollution and exploitation problems associated
with the family business came to your attention, you felt you had to do
something only to find out that rectifying these problems would bankrupt the
company overnight. Should you continue
to live off of these ill-gotten gains?
2)
A
plant is discovered that can cure AIDS.
Unfortunately, the supply is very small and is a keystone species in the
rainforest, which means that many other forms of life depend on it. Scientists have tried to propagate this plant
outside the rainforest in artificial conditions but have had no success. Do you harvest the plant or do you leave it
alone?
3)
You
are opposed to exploiting natural resources, yet you have become accustomed to
the comfort and convenience that this exploitation makes possible. Do you boycott products and companies that
make their fortunes on exploitive business practices even though it means
paying much higher prices for goods made by these earth-friendly companies?
4)
Your
town has no recycling program, which means that recycling becomes a major pain
because you have to collect and deliver your recyclables to a neighboring
town. Since you don’t have a vehicle big
enough to haul much refuse, you are forced to make the trip at least twice a
week. Moreover, since you have started
storing your recyclables, you’re now faced with a cockroach infestation. Do you recycle anyhow? What other options can you come up with to
solve your dilemma?
5)
The
greenhouse effect could be greatly diminished if everyone would conserve energy
by carpooling or riding the bus. You
live a busy life and are reliant on your car as a matter of convenience and
independence. Many of the places you go
are within walking or biking distance of your home. Moreover, there is a DART bus and railway
depot a block from your house that could potentially get you anywhere you need
to go. Do you give up the luxury of
using your car whenever you need to go somewhere and instead take the bus,
walk. or ride your bike?
6)
You
are the mayor of