2clean - 12:05 pm on Mar 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

Ethics in the online environment should be no different than the offline environment, but the nature of the internet's connectivity and global reach throws up some very interesting points for ethics professionals. For example Ethical relativism posits that our ethical frameworks are governed by culture and are therefore localized. But, when that (and the "that" could be a website) gets displayed in a global community you expose it to a wide range of beliefs and ethics, with each one having equal value and validity.

I've thought and read quite a bit to try and start to think about how you take a global medium like the Internet and hold ethical principles true for everyone. I have to say that I don't think you can. For example, I read a recent study on Egyptian and American business students which showed that American studens were more individualistic in their judgement of whether an action was ethical or not, whereas the Egyptian students were more considerate of the implications of their judgement for the community as a whole. Another study tried to match countries together based on commonly held ethical similarities. Interestingly it was Australia that had no similarity with any other country in the World (weird huh!). Still it doesn't really provide the complete answer.

Within the area of our own localized reality I think that we all know what is right and wrong, but because business is an entity is not a person, we allow it to get away with unethical practice when in fact we actually need to reign it in and teach it a little bit about living on planet earth. In the words of Immanuel Kant "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law". In other words, unless you'd want the action you are doing to become true for everyone else (including yourself), don't do it!

I think that every business should have an ethical code of conduct that accurately maps out the thinking of the company online. In this way, even if the person looking at your website is of a different ethical standpoint, at least you convey to them what you stand for, and it also projects something deeper about your business. It is an ethical code that will help you weather unexpected problems in the business sphere by providing a reasoning framework. You won't get pulled by shareholders or managers, but something more solid.

2clean