Dear sir,

yes, It is difficult to make decisions in the technological world due of their negative effect on the environment, the surrounding population and mainly for worker safety.

“Sustainable development is a ‘metafix’ that will unite everybody from the profit minded industrialist and risk-minimizing subsistence farmer to the equity-seeking social worker, the pollution-concerned or wildlife-loving First Worlder, the growth maximizing policy maker, the goal-oriented bureaucrat and, therefore, the vote-counting politician.”

Sharachchandra Lélé

“Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do.”

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce

“Clean air, clean water, safety in city parks, low-income housing, education, child care, welfare, medical care, unemployment (insurance), transportation, recreation/cultural centers, open space, wetlands . . .”

Hazel Wolf, Seattle Audubon Society

In a technological world, albeit there is mechanism to govern IT security / drive ethicality like segregation of duty, segregation of password, logs tracking, avoid using administrator login ID for accountability etc. (some are preventive, some are detect & fix oriented), perhaps other ethical factors / measures need to considered include: ethical climate / environment a person / worker is in, job satisfaction, skill set (proper ways of using IT to perform certain operations to minimize exposure), moral philosophy (Kantianism vs Utilitarianism), perceived punishment / penalty as a result of acting unethically etc.  Based on my observation, it is hard to say is easy or difficult to achieve ethical decision making in a technological world because new security measures or ethical initiatives encourage new ideas how to circumvent the existing ones - and this spiral process cycle will be ongoing.

Greed for success! Less ethical decision making!

Pragmatism and race for remaining competitive and successful affect the managers' decision making where ethical dimension starts loosing.

The directive of the Brundtland Commission to meet “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” proposes a novel ethical concept.

Dear sir,

yes, It is difficult to make decisions in the technological world due of their negative effect on the environment, the surrounding population and mainly for worker safety.

Our RG Friend sent a message:

Ethics are personal. It makes no difference as to whether the world is technological or not - it is about complexity, and the capacity to handle this. This makes communication of the ethical problem and its boundaries more difficult, in some circumstances. The Montreal Protocol was agreed quite quickly, despite the fact that the problem was a complex one - because it could be communicated fairly simply.

“Tzu-kung asked, ‘Is there a single word which can be a guide to conduct throughout one’s life?’ The Master said, ‘It is perhaps the word “shu” [empathy, or consideration]. 

Developed by Karl Henrik Ròbert shortly after the publication of the Brundtland Report, The Natural Step (TNS) presented four principles of sustainability that provide a foundation for the framework. According to this framework, in order to achieve sustainability we must  achieve these four objectives:

1. Eliminate our contribution to the progressive build-up of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust (for example, heavy metals and fossil fuels)

2. Eliminate our contribution to the progressive build-up of chemicals and compounds produced by society (for example, dioxins, PCBs, and DDT)

3. Eliminate our contribution to the progressive physical degradation and destruction of nature and natural processes (for example, over harvesting forests and paving over critical wildlife habitat)

4. Eliminate our contribution to conditions that undermine people’s capacity to meet their basic human needs (for example, unsafe working conditions and not enough pay to live on). 

I am not revealing any secret when I say that, e.g.  (i) A drug,to cure diabetes rapidly, has been discovered long time ago. (ii) Automobile tires which serve 16 years (~ the lifetime of an auto) have been made at pilot scale >3 decades ago. (iii) Some sustainable energy alternatives have been made in small-scale plants of at least 3 developed countries and then stopped.

It is difficult to transfer these 3 examples into serving the human beings (which is ethical decision) because of political & economic factors. There are powerful rich persons, families, and businesses who oppose strongly such transfer. The governments are really servants of these aristocrats (who invested money & efforts and reaped immense continuous profits such as petrodollars). In this technological world, a change is allowed only if the profits of these wealthy increase & not decrease.  

It starts even before birth

Prenatal ethical decision making is a great cause of concern

http://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/pdf/bmh4_ct98_3376_partb.pdf

An interesting question that may require further refinement. I tend to separate decision making from decision implementation. Making  an ethical decision in this context is less of an issue than getting that decision to the real world, in other words, implementing it.

In modern times, technology has been used by "the modern civilised man" to rip mother earth of its wealth, to destroy eco-systems and exploit natural resources to the fullest!...in the name of economic prosperity...in the name of development...in the name of growth...but not in the name of preservation of natural equilibria...ETC

It has been for quite a while we debated issues of ethics and morality - the very essence of  norms and reasons society built trust within, breath fresh air and replenish it self for stability and continuous existence and without which it destroys it self. The technology has nothing to do with the decisions we make but our own thinking, measures of values and modes of reasoning that deform what we want to decide on things that affect the collective welfare of society.

In contemporary world,  the concept of self and absolute freedom of doing things with no social responsibility whatsoever  is hyperventilated and preached to be the absolute true norm by people with insatiable appetite for deception and uncontrolled greed who want to ride their communities, work areas, societies and the world being on top - visible in politics, the economy and work places.   

There is no ethical code on the food chain and clothes chain. The consumer watch the prizes by lack of information. Farmers and other producers have to pay to fill the shelves of the groceries. There is a big gap between consumer and product, this alienation was mentioned a long time ago but the structures are so strong an secrete, the power of the groceries so huge, that the ignorance of the consumer is in fact a real problem.

The same we can say with computer games and the internet in general. To protect the children for the unknown, the invisible  is very difficult because we don’t get it  in our genes yet. We look at the forms and believe the content. .

New ethical concept frames the rights of both present and future peoples, and suggests that everyone’s needs should be fulfilled before the wants of some are addressed. 

Dear All,

Barbara showed us a long list of 18 points on ethical behaviour. I think during making ethical decisions one should consider only one thumb – golden - rule: “We must treat others as we wish others to treat us" or “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself”. These forms can be originated from the Old Testament:  „Love your neighbor as you love yourself." This seems to be a commonplace but its implementation would totally change the world. Unfortunately, each of our problems, evils, difficulties are consequences of the lack of ethics. The main problem is not the lack of information but the deficiency of action. I feel that human culture has created a reverse relationship to reality: we always talk on the public benefit but we fulfil primarily the personnel advantage.  

My view is that ethical decision making is difficult in the case of stakeholders not prone to base their business on sustainable development principles (economic profitability while taking care of environment and society). This case happens every time stakeholders are oriented toward short-term goals rather than long-term ones, and I would say that not only high-tech content sectors are affected by such a short-sighted view of doing business. 

Consequently, I would say that making ethical decisions is not difficult for those companies which embedded sustainable development in their value proposition. 

This is the case of Patagonia, the famous outdoor-clothing company which renounced to short-term gains in the view of promoting an environmentally-friendly production and use of its product. Oddly, exactly for this reason it's been experiencing a double-digit annual growth.

For more info about the Patagonia case, I suggest reading this very nice article from the New Yorker magazine: http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/patagonias-anti-growth-strategy

Best regards

Ilaria

Dear Ilaria,

It is possible I am asking a silly question because I am a business illiterate. Do exist profit oriented companies with long-term goals approaching sustainable development except the Patagonia example you mentioned? Have you got any information on the rate of companies with long and short-term tactics?

Dear András,

yours is not a silly question at all! I feel pleased you found my answer interesting.

In truth I came across the case of Patagonia through a presentation of a course I have attended and not from previous studies, which would have allowed me to reply to your question with backed-up data. Therefore I will be offering you the information I got to know from my personal reading and discussion with colleagues.

Patagonia is the first company I got to know which truly took a stance on the short-term goals and at-any-cost growth. In fact, it decided to embed sustainability, and therefore long-term goals, within its very value proposition. Out there you may find plenty of companies engaging themselves with sustainability initiatives, stemming from the reduction of emissions to the help to local communities in developing countries and so forth. The thing is that a single initiative does not reflect the value proposition of the whole company (and therefore the culture within it) which might be still fond of short-term goals. In fact, some of these companies might implement "green washing" initiatives and charitable activities just to maintain a good reputation. 

Nevertheless, if you want to know the companies committed with sustainability, one possible way might be to take a look to the companies that RobecoSAM, an investment company focused on sustainability, invites every year in order to perform a Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA) on them. 

The results from the CSA turns in the value of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), through which these companies are ranked with respect to sustainability. 

Here some links:http://www.sustainability-indices.com/

http://www.sustainability-indices.com/images/20150331-robecosam-csa-start-eng-vdef.pdf

Hope I contributed to add some more pieces of info useful for you

Best regards

Ilaria

Three sets of interconnected concepts: social, ecological, and economic making sustainability. 

The most difficult aspect of ethics (in my opinion) is that too many people seem quite capable of rationalizing things that I find ethically wrong. So they will debate you, in what to me sounds like a string of excuses.