Abstract:Expectations and possibilities for employee loyalty are shifting rapidly, particularly in the for-profit sector. I explore the nature of employee loyalty to the organization, in particular, those elements of loyalty beyond the notion of the ethical demands of employee loyalty. I consider the moral significance of loyalty for the employee and whether the development of ties of loyalty to the work organization is in fact a good thing for the employee or for the employer. I argue that employees have a natural inclination to extend loyalty to the organization and that organizations consequently have an obligation to make clear to employees the degree to which the organization will recognize and reward employee loyalty.
Ethical tasks faced by researchers in science and engineering as they engage in research include recognition of moral problems in their practice, finding solutions to those moral problems, judging moral actions and engaging in preventive ethics. Given these issues, appropriate pedagogical objectives for research ethics education include (1) teaching researchers to recognize moral issues in their research, (2) teaching researchers to solve practical moral problems in their research from the perspective of the moral agent, (3) teaching researchers how to make moral judgments about actions, and (4) learning to engage in preventive ethics. If web-based research ethics education is intended to be adequate and sufficient for research ethics education, then it must meet those objectives. However there are reasons to be skeptical that it can.
It is not unusual for researchers in ethnography (and sometimes Institutional Review Boards) to assume that research of "public" behavior is morally unproblematic. I examine an historical case of ethnographic research and the sustained moral outrage to the research expressed by the subjects of that research. I suggest that the moral outrage was legitimate and articulate some of the ethical issues underlying that outrage. I argue that morally problematic Ethnographic research of public behavior can derive from research practice that includes a tendency to collapse the distinction between harm and moral wrong, a failure to take account of recent work on ethical issues in privacy; failure to appreciate the deception involved in ethnographers' failure to reveal their role as researchers to subjects and finally a failure to appropriately weigh the moral significance of issues of invasion of privacy and inflicted insight in both the research process and subsequent publication of research.
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