You work for the IRS, the Social Security Administration, a movie-rental company, or an Internet service provider. Someone asks you to get a copy of records about a person. He will pay you $500. You know another employee sells records with people’s personal information.

a. Write out in detail what you believe might be unethical/ethical about the behavior(s) in the scenario.
b. Choose Morality explain how the ethical problem could be solved USING the ethical model that you choose.

a. There are two unethical behaviours taking place in this question. First, the person who is asking you to get the records is acting unethically because he is trying to obtain confidential information through illegal means. He wants to abuse and damage the place where you work. The second unethical behaviour is that of your coworker, who is breaking the rules and betraying the trust of the business owner.

b. As an example of an ethical model, I will chose utilitarianism. Utilitarianism encourages people to try to achieve the largest amount of good for the largest number of people. In this case, if you decided to collaborate with the person, the good that you would get is $500 for yourself. On the other hand, if you decided not to collaborate and instead respected the rules of the place where you work, you would not get that amount of money. However, you would be more likely to keep your job. You would also contribute to the success of this business and to the trust that the public places on such businesses. Therefore, this would be a greater good for more people.