Introduction
Ethics is supposed to be the basis of human society. Justice is one of the principles governing relationships between people regarding the distribution and redistribution of social values. Social values are understood in the broadest sense: freedom, opportunity, income and wealth, signs of prestige, and respect. The fair ones are those who fulfill the law, and the unfair are those who violate people’s rights, for example, depriving them of freedom and property. This paper aims at analyzing the case of Arizona University from the point of view of ethics and reaching a solution corresponding to the ethical principles, along with discussing alternative perspectives on the subject.
The Relevant Ethical Issues
Social contract theory and Kantian ethics determine the way ethics is understood nowadays. These concepts are also known as liberal theories as they are primarily based on personal freedoms and praise human rationality (Lindemann, 2019). The essence of a social contract lies in the idea that there are identified political, ethical, and legal obligations between citizens and government arising from a social agreement. People deliberately transfer their right to preserve their life, property, and freedom to the state, which, through laws and the judiciary, implements it much better. In this theory, people rely on an institution of statehood, in which the guarantor of the integrity of society is a law designed to protect natural rights given from birth. Thereby, students of Arizona University rely on university management and seek safety from the institution authorities. According to this, their freedom of privacy was to be guaranteed by the governance, but the question is if it was.
Deontology is a unique way of determining morality by reducing it to what is proper and fair and what is not. The deontology foundation as an ethical doctrine and presenting its liberalism as a political philosophy is assigned to Kant. The philosopher believed that justice is an unconditional norm of an individual. According to Kant (2018), authorities can strive, for example, to increase the welfare, glory, and power of the people. However, none of these kinds of aspirations should be placed above justice and achieved in contradiction with it. Therefore, the question is if the eagerness of Arizona University’s authorities to use the information gathered unbeknown to their students to improve retention is justified.
Making the Right Decision
Ethics of justice should be at the forefront of all leadership, for it is crucial that individuals with power over the lives of others could be able to reflect ethically on their choices and actions. Strike et al. (2005) have suggested that the administration’s ethical decisions can be approached in two ways: according to the principle of benefits maximization or the principle of equal respect. As the scholars explained, these two concepts come from utilitarianism and Immanuel Kant’s deontological philosophy.
Benefit maximization requires that the morality of actions depends on the consequences in which decisions could result. Strike et al. (2005) emphasize that the best outcome implies “the happiness for the greatest number” (p. 17). In this respect, the action that ends with better results is the right choice. The equal respect principle refers to the Categorical Imperative and involves the freedom of choice for everyone and unconditional respect for all individuals. Treatment of people as instruments to reach goals should be excluded from this standpoint. Considering that ethics mainly deals with the problem of choice, according to Nadkarni (2014), one of the principles described above should be applied to the case.
Consequently, one must decide how each choice affects the parties and simultaneously evaluate each participant’s rights equally. In this context, it appears that the researcher from the case under consideration resorted to the students and their data as the instrument to reach the experiment objectives. It is clear that even if the research outcome is potentially serviceable to the organization, the students’ freedoms are violated. In this case, the freshmen have the right to know that the data about operations they make and their location is tracked. Furthermore, the unwilling participants of the experiment should be able to decide whether they want to be part of the research, as “people have a right to freely choose their own conception of their good” (Strike et al., 2005, p. 42). Therefore, the university’s assistant provost’s proposal to inform the students must be the right choice. Otherwise, according to the social contract theory, they would fail the mission expected from them: preserving their people’s freedoms.
Other Perspectives
Above all, the university is an organization with a distinct corporate culture; therefore, management practices apply to universities and their decision-making processes. It is believed that nowadays, the techno-economic management paradigm is replaced with humanistic management centered on people (Roszkowska & Melé, 2020). Based on this, the organization is seen as a community of persons, which praises each individual for their uniqueness, free will, dignity, and prosperity of everyone who builds the group. Students, beyond any doubts, are the members of the university community.
Educational institutions appear to be among those complicated for government, as they are excellent examples of the “garbage can model” (Bazerman & Moore, 2017). It is characterized by problematic preferences demonstrated in the case: authorities struggle to choose between risk and reputation, new ideas, and traditional procedures. In this case, the important parties, such as enrolled students and university partners like CatCard, were excluded or ignored in the final decision-making process.
In accordance with humanistic management and the university’s decision-making process reviewed by Bazerman & Moore (2017), the following steps should be implemented. First, negotiations should be held regarding the future solution, its options, and its implementation conditions. Second, to increase the chances of a preferred solution, the management had to negotiate with all the organization members, including students and CatCard, as the partner regarding their privacy policy. As a result, preliminary support should be obtained or at least a neutral position achieved on their part. Thus, the organization’s decision-making processes do not go far from the ethical principles and coincide with them on many occasions.
Conclusion
Overall, ethics with its main principles – equality, liberty, and justice – serve society and organizations’ proper functioning. As seen from the case analyzed, such ethical philosophies as social contract theory and Kantian deontology are of help when deciding problematic issues and making the right choices. Two principles are derived from these – of benefit maximization and equal respect. Adherence to one of these can guarantee the correct decision making. However, there is a tendency nowadays in organizational management to lean towards ethics, as decision-making procedures include ethical principles, and the humanistic model is applied at administration. Therefore, there is a hope that modern society is starting to be guided by ethical principles and will proceed on this journey.
References
Bazerman, M. H., & Moore, D. A. (2017). Judgment in managerial decision making (8th ed.). Wiley.
Kant, I. (2018). Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals. (A. W. Wood, Ed.). Yale University Press.
Lindemann, H. (2019). An invitation to feminist ethics (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Nadkarni, M. V. (2014). Ethics for our times: essays in Gandhian perspective (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Strike, K. A., Haller, E. J., & Soltis, J. F. (2005). The ethics of school administration. Teachers College Press.
Roszkowska, P., & Melé, D. (2020). Organizational factors in the individual ethical behavior. the notion of the “Organizational moral structure.” Humanistic Management Journal, (5)1, 1-42. Web.