ETHICAL AWARENESS AND ETHICAL JUDGMENT

We refer to this initial step in the ethical decision-making process as ethical awareness. With ethical awareness, a person recognizes that a situation or issue is one that raises ethical concerns and must be thought about in ethical terms. It is an important step that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Sometimes people are simply unaware that they are facing an issue with ethical overtones. And, if they don’t recognize and label the issue as an ethical one, ethical judgment processes will not be engaged. In fascinating new research, parts of the brain that are associated with recognizing the ethical nature of an issue were differentiated from those involved in other kinds of thinking. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a study showing that when Executive MBA students identified ‘‘an important point or issue’’ in scenarios, a different part of the brain was more active when the issue had ethical overtones compared to more neutral issues.

In a different study, a part of the brain associated with emotional processing was activated when participants viewed morally relevant pictures compared to more neutral ones. So, it seems that something different happens in our brains when we begin thinking about an issue we recognize as having ethical overtones.

Consider the following ethical awareness example. Students are doing more online research for classroom assignments. The technology makes it easy to find up-to-date information, download it, and cut and paste it right into a paper that then gets submitted to a professor for a grade. Perhaps you have done this without thinking too much about it. However, in this process, students often overlook the fact that they may be plagiarizing—‘‘stealing’’ someone else’s intellectual property. Intellectual property is protected by copyright and patent laws in the United States. These laws are important because there would simply be no incentive to write a book, publish a magazine, or develop a new product if anyone could simply reproduce it freely without any attention to the rights of the person or company that invested time and resources to create it. The education community has adopted academic integrity rules that guide how students can fairly use intellectual property. In keeping with those rules, students are expected to paraphrase and then carefully reference all sources of information. When you’re quoting someone else’s words, these words must be put in quotation marks, and the exact citation to the source must be provided. In the pre-Internet days, this kind of research meant physically going to the library, searching the shelves for information, copying pertinent information by hand, making careful notes about the sources, and then organizing the information into a paper that had to be typed from scratch.

Plagiarism actually required conscious effort in those days. Now, information is so accessible and it’s so easy to simply cut and paste that it can be harder to recognize the ethical issues involved. But if your college has an academic integrity policy or honor code, your professor takes the time to explain the importance of academic integrity, the role of intellectual property in our society, the definition of plagiarism, and your responsibilities as a member of the higher education community, you should be more aware of the ethical issues involved. Under those circumstances, when you’re tempted to just cut and paste, you’ll be more likely to think about the ethical dimensions of your actions—the rights of the intellectual property owner, and whether your actions would be considered plagiarism by your professor and others in your academic community.