Exercise – Ethical behaviour

You find some good images on the web that would look good on your site.  You copy and paste them to your blog.

• I think copying any image which is someone’s creativity without proper referencing is not ethical.
• Copying images from some websites which offer free images which already have the right to be shared in public is ethical.
• Copy and paste an image which has copyright can be done in ethical way by providing proper referencing and copyright information.

You are in a hurry to finish an assignment and you find the perfect explanation of a difficult concept on Wikipedia. You decide to copy it into your work.

• Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source. At any moment, anybody can edit Wikipedia. It implies that any data that it holds may be theft, a work in progress or a simple mistake at any given time.
• Better to use relevant data from google scholar or from college library.
• Being hurry means the chances for collecting wrong data is high, so better to do it as early as possible to avoid unnecessary confusions and mistakes.

You are a medical researcher and you think you have discovered a new drug that cures lung cancer.  It worked well on mice although a few of them died of heart problems. You want to test it on people.  You recruit 100 lung cancer patients into your treatment programme. You don’t tell them about the new drug.  You treat 50 patients with usual drugs and 50 with the new drug to see which is better.

• Conducting test on patients without informing them about the medicine details is against the ethics of medical clinical trials. In above case, some of the mice died after taking medicine, so it shows the side effect of the medicine. Without identifying and rectifying this defect it is not safe to treat patients. Thus usage of above drug on patients is against the ethics.
• In some critical case, doctors allow patients to try any other medicine for testing purpose. I have dealt with same situation in real life when my uncle was effected with stage 3 of multiple myeloma. We heard about one ayurvedic medicine developed using tree barks and roots in northern part of India. So we went their and bought the medicine and tried it on my uncle with doctors consent as he was going into a sinking stage and his body was rejecting the cancer medicines. Surprisingly after giving the ayurvedic medicine uncle was showing tremendous change, he started responding to our talks and he even started taking food.
• Human body is still a mystery. So in some rare cases we need to test the body with new medicines to see the result. But if the medicine which is to be tested showed very bad side effect then it is not fit to be tested on patients.

You are doing your PhD about drug abuse among students.  You interview 30 students about their drug use. You discover that one of the students is actually a fairly big time dealer and you report him to the police.

• Based on the students perspective it is not ethical to report about the student to police. In order to take the interview the student might have signed an agreement that his details and answers reported by him won’t be disclosed to anyone.
• In order to report this to police the interviewer can give information about the drug gang without disclosing about the student details. Eventually police will know about the drug dealers details and take necessary measures for it.

You are a researcher looking at the effect of violent computer games on children.  You recruit 20 children into your study. Over a month you regularly show them images of violence to see if it has an adverse effect on their behaviour.  One of the children becomes quite distressed each time and so you stop showing her images and drop her from the study.

• The above research is clearly unethical. The above study is only focusing on the violence part involved in games. But there is a proper classification of games for children and adults. So this research with violent image is not ethical.
• Study can be done without violent images. There are many study conducted on effect of computer games on children. It has proved that computer games can improve the logical and visual response speed of children. Children are like growing fruits of nature, a small impact on them will have larger effects on their behaviour. So any study based on children should be conducted in a proper ethical way.

You want to research how easy it is to hack into your organisation’s computer system by persuading people to divulge login and password details.  You recruit a small team to ring up key people in the organisation and persuade them to give either their own or their boss’s details.

• It is not ethical to hack into some company by persuading a person to give away his/her login details.
• The above study is ethical if the company is dealing with very confidential domain. So this type of hack drill can be conducted by the company’s cyber security team in order to identify what can make an employee give away his/her login details or details about the company. Thus a proper security measure can be taken against such real life situation in future.

You are doing an initial research in area of a town where many bars and pubs are located, to estimate the level of problematic social behaviour in the area. Your research is independent from the police, because you want to observe their behaviour as well. You observe both abusive and violent behaviour.

• First of all it is a very risky research. The researcher can get into trouble if the situation becomes violent. This research is not against the ethics. In order to identify the depth of the behaviour surrounding the area, the researcher need to blend in with the situation to get a proper result for the research.
• This research can be done in more ethical and safe way. By informing any trusted person from police or taking some trusted persons along while doing this research. Also this can be done by talking to some of the regular customers of the bar and pubs in that area.