Ethical decision-making in workplace fraud and academic integrity scenarios

¶ … company's corporate social responsibility is to rectify the fraud and return the money to the customers. Moreover, the company needs to report the culprit to the authorities. If the culprit is my spouse's sibling, I would have a personal ethical responsibility to alert my spouse prior to taking action, but I would not allow any personal pleas for leniency to impede justice. Potential challenges might be the relationship with my spouse, but that is a personal challenge that has little to do with how to proceed with Dell. The concept of corporate social responsibility has more to do with broader issues, such as Dell's commitment to the environment or its policies about LGBTQ employees (Thorpe, 2013). However, this case does demonstrate more fundamental ethical tenets.

Scenario

How I act in this scenario depends on whether or not the course is meaningful to me. Given I am performing at only 60%, I might not be that interested in the course. I might be able to look at the test scores being on that specific computer as being a stroke of luck, a strong coincidence given my predicament. It was the professor's responsibility to log out of the computer. Taking the test answers and passing them off as my own does not actually harm anyone. It does not harm me in the sense that I do not care about the course, and in fact it helps me to pass a course that means very little to me. Retaking the course could mean my dropping out of school because paying the additional fee could be a tremendous hardship. Given the professor's predilection for weighting the examination score as a full 20% of the grade, I would opt to take advantage of the stroke of good luck as long as I am willing to accept the consequences if I were to get caught. The consequences could mean I was actually suspended from school. If I make the choice to cheat, I would also contend with feelings of guilt in the long run, but only if the course had been central to my major. I am basing my ethical decision on the school of thought known as rational egoism (Moseley, 2016).

Summary

The concepts we studied have demonstrated how important ethical decision-making can be. Each day we are confronted with different ethical dilemmas. Sometimes those dilemmas are relatively easy to resolve, but other times, they are more challenging and require us to reconcile loyalties to different people or different principles.

With regard to search strategies, the concepts we have learned this week will help me in my future career because I am more informed and media literate. I know how to identify a credible from a source that is not credible. I also know how to use search terms more wisely in internet contexts as well as search terms used in academic databases or Googlescholar.