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Does the Internet change the boundaries of ethical behavior?
NO
Walter Wager
Ethical behavior is a personal choice
Ethical behavior might be defined as behavior in line with a set of moral values or principles set by the culture within which the individual behavior occurs. In order to be a member of this culture, individuals must abide by them. To be sure, unethical behaviors occur on the Internet, but they also occur apart from the Internet—the WorldCom scandal, for example. The onus for ethical behavior rests with the individual. He or she chooses to enter the pornography site, to participate in an Internet scam, to transfer copyrighted material or to access private records.
The Internet does not represent a single set of cultural values, nor is it policed by any single agency. Individuals face many temptations every day and although the Internet certainly increases access to these temptations, we must make personal ethical decisions in spite of the pressures or opportunities to do otherwise. Take, for instance, a simple ethical transgression of transferring copyrighted material. The Internet makes it easy for individuals to share music or videos. The law, no less a sense of ethics, says this is wrong, yet it has become common practice in many student communities. We didn’t see universities become concerned until media companies started to sue them.
Would unethical activity continue if it weren’t policed? And, whose responsibility is it to police the Internet, anyway? As Internet providers, universities say it is impractical for them to do it without violating public privacy laws, and so we have a conflict of individual privacy rights versus public law.
The first line of defense for ethical behavior on the Internet is awareness of what is unethical. The second is for respected people to make it clear that unethical behavior will not be tolerated. The Internet provides easy access to a wide variety of cultures, opinions and, unfortunately, individuals who take advantage of the uninformed. Ethical behavior in general, and with regard to the Internet specifically, is something that should be discussed and brought to the attention of vulnerable populations within our culture.
There are tools available on the Internet that help decrease unethical behavior. These include filters for objectionable material, as well as plagiarism detectors designed to protect intellectual property. Nevertheless, with or without the Internet, ethical behavior always will be a personal choice.
Walter Wager, a professor of instructional systems at Florida State University, is coordinator of instructional development services in the Office for Distributed and Distance Learning.
YES
Sanford Kreisberg
What’s ethical depends on the environment
Does being in a new city, or on a ship or a desert island, change the boundaries of ethical behavior? Each is an environment with its own rules and codes of conduct and unique ethical crossroads. The Internet is a new environment. It is not ethical (or legal for that matter) to shout “fire” in a crowded movie theater, but it is legal and ethically irrelevant to shout “fire” while alone in a pasture. Ethics will always turn on distinctions, circumstances and environments.
What about plagiarism? Surprisingly, this is an easy call. The Internet makes plagiarism easy, but core plagiarism (and we all know what that is) is still plagiarism. What the Internet requires here is education. We must inform our students what plagiarism is, and how and why to avoid it. As we all know, many students have grown up where cutting and pasting jokes and news articles into e-mails is second nature. Students need to be taught that schoolwork must be original or cited correctly to its source.
But, what about this recent incident: The Web site for a book by a professor, which had been created by an assistant at the college’s publicity office, was found to plagiarize from the Internet encyclopedia Encarta. The book itself did not plagiarize, but what is the ethical obligation of the professor to review his own Web site? He has some obligation, I would argue, but I’d want to know a great deal more about how the site was created, who was pushing it (the school or the professor) and how much the professor knew or should have known about it. Those questions, of course, predate the Internet, but a nuanced answer is only possible by understanding the Internet.
In the news this semester: the case of the business school applicants who executed a browser trick that enabled some of them to view a hidden page on their application software which revealed the result a month early. Some business schools called that hacking, illegal, and instantly rejected the students. Other schools said: Slow down, let’s find out more. Let’s try to filter our classic ethical guide stars about cheating, hacking and taking unfair advantage through this new light. No one was harmed, the students were legally on their own page, and they may have been driven by curiosity, impulse, or even ignorance. Those schools, I would submit, are being smarter and also more ethical themselves. The Internet does not change ethics; it changes the boundaries of what needs to be considered before making ethical decisions.
Sanford Kreisberg, an admissions consultant, taught expository writing at Harvard University and is the founder of the Cambridge Essay Service.
