James Drogan

Complementary to Ethics, Critical Thinking, and Communications, a recent lecture note, are the following two items that came across my desk this morning.

First, is For Bank of America and Merrill, Love Was Blind from this morning's New York Times.  Deep in this examination of the relationship between these two banks is the following paragraph.

"Interviews with almost 30 current and former Bank of America and Merrill executives and employees convey just how messy the merger has been. All of them asked not to be identified because they either did not have permission from the banks to speak or because they had signed confidentiality agreements with their former employers."

My observation here is that the article, while, in my view, newsworthy, brings to light ethical issues beyond the obvious.  Is it ethical for those who can "...not to be identified because they either did not have permission from the banks to speak..." to in fact speak?

Is it ethical for those that "...had signed confidentiality agreements..." to violate those agreements?

Is it ethical for journalism to motivate this behavior?

Second, is Irving Wladawsky-Berger's piece titled A Gathering Storm We Totally Missed where he takes to task his colleagues in the technical and research community for their failure to speak out, early and often, on an issue important to the national interest.

Did this community have an ethical failure?

Smart people can defend these decisions as, at a minimum, not being ethical failures.  But is ethics about performing at the lowest common denominator?  Journalism will argue that their behavior is perfectly legitimate within their context.  It's not their problem if others fail to keep their confidentiality agreements.  And if journalism encourages this behavior it's for a good and sufficient reason.  My observation would be that people who violate agreements often have selfish reasons for doing so.

I do suggest that these situations represent learning opportunities.  It's worth a bit of time to thinking about how each of us might react if we found amidst the events described in the two articles.

As for me I would like to think that in the first case I would have held to the agreements I had made.  In the second case I suspect I would not have said anything.