Ethics

See also Research ethics.

• Luban, D., Strudler, A., & Wasserman, D. (1992). Moral responsibility in the age of bureaucracy. Michigan Law Review, 90(8), 2348–2392. doi:10.2307/1289575

  If you are part of a large, complicated organization involved in a large, complicated project, and that project results in immoral or illegal activities, how responsible are you? You may not have had complete information; you may not have known how subordinates would implement your orders or what superiors were up to; you may not have been informed of the consequences of actions. Argues that, nonetheless, you have five moral obligations:

  Investigation

  You should understand your project and how it is being used

  Communication

  If you “possess troublesome knowledge”, i.e. know something morally suspect is occurring, you should communicate it to others in the organization

  Protection

  You are obligated to protect your subordinates from retaliation for their investigation and communications, i.e. you must protect whistleblowers

  Prevention

  You should design corporate structures to encourage these obligations: ombudsmen, anonymous reporting systems, incentives that reward safety and honesty, etc.

  Precaution

  If an organization is so corrupted or dangerous that none of the above obligations can be met, if once you join you will be powerless to prevent your work from contributing to moral wrongs – then the act of joining is morally wrong.

  These obligations are like the legal concepts of reckless or negligent behavior. If you join an organization, fail to meet these obligations, and thus contribute to some morally wrong act, you are responsible for recklessly or negligently facilitating that act. This is not as bad as deliberately committing the act, but also you are not blameless because you didn’t know or couldn’t stop it; you should have known and should have tried to stop it. And your managers are also to blame for building an organizational culture that does not encourage these obligations.

  I wonder if there is an analogy to safety: airline pilots or ship’s captains have final authority over their craft so responsibility is not spread out but is concentrated in one person who has the authority to take action to prevent unsafe conditions. There is no “I didn’t know” excuse; you are responsible for finding out. This avoids complicated system failure cases where no one person seems responsible. Should there be a moral equivalent as well?