When I started reading, I thought I might have a lot of trouble finding an ethical situation in our White Paper, since our topic is fairly mundane (comparing wireless routers for home use). Other than straight up lying or misrepresenting information, I wasn't sure how I might address ethics, but with the division of ethical systems, I think it becomes easier to see how each system contributes to possible ethical situations.
Personal ethics, which the reading defines as values from family, culture and faith, seem the least likely to present themselves in our white paper. But, often we tend to lean towards brands that we know, so if one of us had grown up with parents who worked for Linksys, or something, we might find ourselves in an ethical situation. We might feel as though we were violating our personal ethics by including competing brands and struggle with not recommending Linksys because we feel those are better (although it's likely for no reason other than we're just sure it is!).
Social ethics – which TCT says are values derived from constitutional, legal, utilitarian & caring sources – seem to me to be a little bit clearer in terms of making ethical decisions. In terms of our white paper, it would be illegal for us to intentionally (and possibly unintentionally as well) misrepresent any of the products we're evaluating. Other social ethical issues we might run into here are copyright and citation issues. We could easily pull images from the internet to bolster our white paper, and some of these images are likely to be under copyright. Since we'd be using them for educational purposes, chances are that we'd be exempt from the copyright, but I believe it's still required (or at least safest) that you ask permission to use them. We also have to make sure that we're citing our sources well and in all the necessary instances.
The third ethical system the reading addresses are conservation ethics. These ethics are values required to protect and preserve the ecosystem. The only way I can think of conservation ethics coming into play with our white paper is if we find that one router just sucks energy in some way that's bad for the environment, but this might be its only flaw. Then we have an issue about debating whether or not to include it knowing that people might choose it, but we also have a responsibility to remain neutral and just give the facts in our white paper.
Fan Boys & Pollution
I didn't even think about the issue of recommending a product based on personal reasons. Nobody that I know of works for any of the router manufacturers, and I'm not a fan boy of any particular brand, so I'm hoping that it'll be easy to keep our paper as neutral as possible.
As for conservation ethics, I thought of some other possible environmental impacts, but I'm not sure if we'd be able to research them. What if the manufacturing plant for a certain product produced a lot of pollution? Or what if a certain component in a router required a lot of energy to produce it? While one product may be the most energy efficient in a home, the environmental impact over its entire life may be rather significant.
Hmm ...
I don't anticipate any trouble in keeping our paper neutral; I don't think any of us have particular ties to a certain company or emotional connections a certain brand! I agree with you – I think this will help us in the long run.
I hadn't thought about the manufacturing plant producing pollution itself. I think you're right here, too, though. This would be really difficult for us to research, and I'm not sure how much of an impact it would have for consumers. I think if we decided we wanted to address conservation in our white paper somehow, we might be better off looking at how much electricity each router uses, etc. This low electricity usage could also contribute to a positive thing for overall cost as well.
Kristin