Leadership Foundations in Research

After studying ethics for the past nine weeks, my biggest takeaways are fairly simple: 1) Avoid slipper-slope arguments; 2) Embrace opposing opinions — when they’re thought through; and 3) Answers are less important than questions. I picked avoiding slipper-slope arguments as my first real takeaway because of just how popular they are in society. People lean on slipper-slopes constantly, it seems, even though they don’t have a lot of weight behind them. As an argument, they’re faulty, because they serve mostly to deflect. Instead of focusing on the issue at hand, slippery slopes allude to possible future outcomes that are impossible to predict, using them as the reason why a particular course of action is wrong in the first place. Even worse, though, they rely on fear, not logic, to make their points. In short: Slippery-slope arguments sound good, but they’re usually weak and lazy, and I’ll be trying to avoid them from here out. When it comes to opposing viewpoints, I believe...

Citizens should have a right to bear arms — but with restrictions. When it comes to gun control, I subscribe to the theory of moderate abolition (MA) (LaFollette, p. 179), the belief that, although gun ownership should be allowed, that right comes with an asterisk. The rules surrounding guns must be stricter. Essentially, I subscribe to the belief that rights come with inherent limitations, and guns are no different. “My right to free religious expression gives me wide discretion in how I exercise my religion. … (but) it does not permit me to sacrifice humans” (LaFollette, p. 180). When one person’s rights begin infringing on other people’s rights, the system must be rethought, even restructured. Currently a constitutional right, gun ownership in America is such a heated debate partly, I believe, because of how deep-seated the issue is in the concept of the “American spirit.” America is a nation that values autonomy, and its right to protect that autonomy, which serves as arg...

Externally, my company portrays its values the same as most corporations do: on a webpage marked “ Values, Mission and Vision .” That’s common practice, and it may give visitors a decent idea of what the firm is and what it strives to do, but it doesn’t offer the faintest hint to anyone of how employees actually act, and if the words written down in black and white match the attitudes seen in the hallways and office buildings. For the most part, I think it’s safe to say that the majority of my colleagues behave ethically and that they avoid the slippery slope of Chuck Gallagher’s “unethical continuum” (Gallagher, 2013). One time that they didn’t, however, happened a couple years back, when a former coworker tried to print hundreds of copies of a flier for her “side-hustle” business on company paper. It’s admittedly not the worst/most unethical thing in the world, but what made it worse was that a printer glitch occurred which duplicated the job she sent to the printer. In the end, ...

Ben Franklin’s idea of maintaining a scorecard to help keep him “on track,” when it comes to living a virtuous life, is something I can relate to. Although I’ve never formally written down any standards to live by, I keep a sort of informal doctrine in my head to remind me of my priorities. Over time, I’ve realized that this set of rules not only exemplifies what’s important to me but also reinforces a set of habits that, I’ve learned over time, make me feel the most useful and engaged. In that way, the standards serve as a reminder to live well and do well, as Aristotle (LaFollette, p. 213) would promote. A few of the virtues on Franklin’s list that I relate to most are those of Industry, Order and Resolution. These three tenants are all inter-related, but they can be applied to several facets on life. That’s why I like them — because “theorizing divorced from practice is useless” (LaFollette, p. 216). At first glance, this trio might seem to only deal with discipline, and that’...

The Benefits of Ethical Guidelines Bound by ethical guidelines, marketers are given a sort of playbook, outlining exactly what’s allowed and what isn’t within their business. They can exaggerate how hard it is to complete a simple task in an infomercial advertising a tool meant to improve a given process, for instance (and these segments are usually shot in pale black-and-white for extra effect [and, for my money, they’re the funniest things on TV]). They can’t exaggerate the features of their product in the infomercial, though, or say that it does things that it does not. That structure has to make a difference. The problem with that perspective, though, is that it might seem to imply that, without rules, all marketers would be dishonest. That’s not the case — but, all systems need structure, rules, and guiding principles. Without that playbook outlining the boundaries of what marketing is and isn’t, those working in the industry wouldn’t have parameters within which t...

Because it is such a loaded issue, affirmative action can be a tough one to gauge for worth and impact. On the one hand, it’s founded on good intentions; but on the other, it’s far from a perfect science or system. I “get” both sides of that coin, and I appreciate the conflict between trying to do what’s “right,” but trying to do so smartly. All of that aside, though, affirmative action is ethical in my mind. A consequentialist might argue in support of it because it positively impacts a greater number of people than it supposedly hurts. For this particular issue, that’s the lens through which I see it, too. The greatest argument against affirmative action, to me, is that it hurts those who have done no wrong. This argument is what I want to focus on most here, because it encapsulates a couple of the others, which is what gives it its power. The logic is that a more qualified job candidate can be (or will be) passed up in order to give a job to an African-American candidate — not due t...

When it comes to personal values and a sense of ethics or morality, I've always prescribed to the slippery slope theory. This idea -- that one small indiscretion makes way for a slightly larger indiscretion, and so on -- doesn't always apply to every case (some fanatics bring it to an extreme when they argue against things like civil rights, for instance). But I've seen it in play in my own life, in a variety of ways. The same way that modern audiences, after decades of seeing escalated versions of violence in horror films, can become desensitized to movie gore, the same phenomenon, I believe, can happen in other spheres. At the risk of appearing to take a political stance, let's talk about President Donald Trump. I've seen both a slippery slope effect, as well as themes from Kramer's article (2003) in his campaign for president, and in how the public seems to receive him. In the 1970s and 1980s, Trump's fame increased for a few different reasons but, m...