Ethical Behaviour

Through this post, I have been assigned to analyze study cases regarding ethics and moral. The aim is to determine if the case is considered wrong in terms of ethics, moral or other aspects. If there is a problem, I will come up with a solution according to the study case.

 You find some good images on the web that would look good on your site.  You copy and paste them to your blog. 

From my perspective, I do not consider this as an ethical or a moral matter. It would fit better to the case of copyright. Every picture on the internet has its own copyright license. Some are free to use but some have a stern license.

As internet user, especially creators, these matter should not be taken for granted. It could lead to serious issues if not understood correctly. Most of the time, the images that cannot be freely copied/used will state that you need to buy the picture with a certain license or you might only need to mention the owner in your creation.

Working in photography field, this issue happens quite a lot where people just steal images and claim it as their own. This is exactly the problem why, when you upload your own images or pictures online, make sure to state your copyright license to the readers or viewers.

You are in a hurry to finish an assignment and you find the perfect explanation of a difficult concept on wikipedia. You decide to copy it into your work.

As every education institute has always stated, copying information from wikipedia is not to be justified. Though it is not considered unethical, it shows the integrity of the student.

For me, Wikipedia could be used in 2 ways. First is to use the references on the bottom of the page and start to search the explanations in the sources stated there. It is also a good exercise to read from various sources and understand the information from the original authors. Second way to use Wikipedia is for a place to understand the concept. You can then write the explanations in your own words or try to find another source for reference.

You are a medical researcher and you think you have discovered a new drug that cures lung cancer.  It worked well on mice although a few of them died of heart problems. You want to test it on people.  You recruit 100 lung cancer patients into your treatment programme. You don’t tell them about the new drug.  You treat 50 patients with usual drugs and 50 with the new drug to see which is better.

This is an unethical research being done because of various reasons. This research should not be conducted as it endangers the patients. However, there are some justification for this research due to the subject of cancer.

The first reason is that the drugs had some failures on mice which by itself is considered dangerous. Without further research on animals, the research goes straight to human subjects. Ethically, the patients should now what kind of drugs they are about to take.

Some people have stated that this method could actually be justified with the reason of a desperate measure from cancer patients. As we all know, there are no known cure for cancer yet. Therefore, experimental drugs is sometimes still accepted by cancer patients as last resort.

Even with the reason of the sake of society, personally, I don’t justify this approach as the high risk that it brings to human. At the very least, the experiments with mice should have higher or even near 100% survivability.

You are doing your PhD about drug abuse among students.  You interview 30 students about their drug use. You discover that one of the students is actually a fairly big time dealer and you report him to the police.

As researcher, I would believe that we should be as neutral as possible and make sure that the research does not cause a bad impact to the participants. However, as a citizen, we should do what is right for the society.

This kind of incident could be mitigated by giving statements and agreement before conducting the research. It should state that if the participant is known as a drug dealer while the research is being conducted, the paricipant will be reported to a legal entity. This would filter out the people who might actually cause problems with in the research.

Another approach that could be implemented is to create an anonymous research where the researcher does not know anyone in the area and instead of names, numbers are used. This would create the anonymity of the participants and protect their identity.

You are a researcher looking at the effect of violent computer games on children.  You recruit 20 children into your study. Over a month you regularly show them images of violence to see if it has an adverse effect on their behaviour.  One of the children becomes quite distressed each time and so you stop showing her images and drop her from the study. 

Children are a very sensitive topic to discuss on a research. The researchers have to be careful in the ethical and moral aspect of the approach. In this case, the research is tring to expose children to violence which is considered unethical and immoral.

The only way to conduct this research is to scope the participants to children who have been exposed to violent computer games. This is also a way to show that the problem is currently a concern in the society.

You want to research how easy it is to hack into your organisation’s computer system by persuading people to divulge login and password details.  You recruit a small team to ring up key people in the organisation and persuade them to give either their own or their boss’s details.

Personally, I would consider this approach as a moral and legal matter. It is considered illegal to get unauthorized access without any knowing authority.

For this approach, there should be an agreement and scope on how the test will be conducted. This agreement will be signed and known by an authority in the company. Therefore, the penetration tester team legally cannot do anything out of the scope which has been agreed on.

You are doing an initial research in area of a town where many bars and pubs are located, to estimate the level of problematic social behaviour in the area. your research is independent from the police, because you want to observe their behaviour as well. You observe both abusive and violent behaviour. 

As I have stated before, that the research should be as neutral as possible. This is also an observational research where the researcher’s participation should not affect the result.

The problem in this case is at what scale we, as a citizen and a researcher, should inform the police about the violence. It is a good idea to scope the level of violence in the research and determine at which level of violence should it be stopped and informed to the police.