Chapter 5 in TCT is something that many important people in the news recently should take a few minutes to look over. With all the greed and the “bad decisions” that government leaders, bankers, and investors have made in the recent sub-prime meltdown, it would be easy to assume that there aren’t any morals or ethics left in the world. According to TCT ethics are, “a system of moral, social, and cultural values that govern an individual or community”. TCT takes this definition and breaks it up into 3 subsets: social, personal and conservation.
What interested me the most, was the idea of conservation ethics. This fits very nicely with our white paper topic. While our primary audience is contractors who would be installing the geothermal system, the secondary reader will be someone who has high conservation ethics. These people understand the need to reduce humankind’s impact on the environment and what could result if nothing is done. While the contractor could also have a high conservation ethic, the home owner is the one that is actually seeking out the energy alternative.
The topic of copyrighting and plagiarism were also addresses in previous readings. However what was covered early discussed how to avoid plagiarism and infringing on copyrights. Chapter 5 continues to discuss how to avoid these things as well as what to do about copyrighting your own material, which as it turns out is as easy as writing this Reading Response.
Not only did this chapter discuss different types of ethics but it also goes into great detail about resolving an ethical dilemma. I like how not only did the reading talk about ethics and ethical dilemmas, but it also gave readers five questions that they can ask themselves to hopefully resolve the dilemma. This is something that can easily be applied out in the real world. I feel that as more companies try and make ends meet, more and more employees are going to be faced with following the company and following what is right…even if that means losing their job. The case study at the end is a great example. Hopefully when people are caught the punishment is so unattractive (not that many punishments are attractive) that if discourages over from attempting the same thing.
Copyrights and Rules
Something that your blog reminded me of is that a reporter recently wrote a review early about a new movie. Because the reporter wrote the review on an illegal copy of the movie, he was fired after 10 years with the company. This is a great example of not following rules and copyrights and paying the consequences. Also in college if someone does not cite their sources well, then they are liable and can get in a lot of trouble. With this in mind, I think that college students should take an introduction course on citing sources. This would help a help deal with students getting in trouble with academic dishonesty.
Good idea
I think that spending more time talking about properly citing your sources would be a good idea. While I was always told to "cite your sources" in high school and ENGL 106 they never really went into that much detail. That was one of the things that I learned the most in the last chapter we read: the difference between summarizing, quoting and paraphrasing. I'm sure there have been cases where a student thought they were properly citing a source (within a paper, not just putting it in the bibliography) only to find out that they weren't doing it properly. There’s even reporters and authors out there that have gotten in major trouble for not citing their sources properly so there’s a good chance that more people need some clarification on it.
Andy
Citations
That's a good point, I've never had any one person explain how it all works to me. It has been a rather slow process of learning how to properly cite things (still not as good as I should be) and when it is ok to summarize/paraphrase. It started in high school with simple bibliographies and progressed through citations, gradually, during college/research. At this point it is more a hindrance than anything...I feel like I spend as much time formatting and checking citations as I do actually writing a paper. I think there is some degree of variability though and this is why, perhaps, no one-person teaches us everything. I know, at least, different scientific journals require different formats for the citations.
Current events!
I found this blog of yours very interesting, I like how you brought current political topics into your blog that was a great way to show how important ethics are and how everyone, in every job needs to think about ethics and be aware of what is ethical and unethical. You are exactly right when you talked about how with many struggling companies today the number of unethical practices are likely to increase because businesses are doing everything they possibly can to stay alive. I think the 5 questions from the text are an excellent way for companies to get a better idea or whether or not they are being completely ethical.
doing the right thing
I also read about what happened to the movie reviewer that dbasso brought up. What made it even worse was the reviewer openly admitted in his review that he had downloaded the illegal copy. The story can be found here too. http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/fox-news-fires-reporter-over-illegal-wo...
I think it is great the Fox did the right thing with firing the columnist over his actions. I think if he had read the chapter that we had to read last Monday he could have applied the decision making process found in TCT in order to decide if he should have downloaded the movie and reviewed it for his column.
Patrick Griffin
pgriffin@purdue.edu