Is this unethical? What should I do?

From time to time, I get requests from people as to how to handle a situation in a company for which they work or with which they do business. Often these take the form of a description of what the company is doing, a question on whether this is ethical, and the follow-up question: “What do you think I should do?”

As much as I have the normal delusions of grandeur that everyone shares, I really resist the inclination to become an ethical “answer man.” I prefer to lay out the principles involved in suggesting how they might apply to a situation. But, I’d rather leave the final judgment to the person on the scene.

First, I realize that not everyone sees the same “facts” in the same way. We each filter what we see through our own particular prism. Since I get that filtered information second-hand, it puts me even one step further from reality. This is the same reason doctors don’t like to give curb-side diagnoses, or, worse still, give a diagnosis based on a third party’s description of the symptoms.

The harder question to answer is what someone should do if he or she is convinced that what is going on at the company is unethical. The problem comes from each situation having so many variables — many of them subjective — that a long-distance solution would be presumptuous and probably unethical in itself.

As with everything else, the extremes, the trivial, and the serious are easy. Your boss has a habit of writing out all his personal checks on his lunch hour and then uses a company paper clip to clip them together when he puts them in his brief case. What should you do? Nothing. It’s really too trivial to worry much about.

On the other hand, your boss kills a fellow worker and stuffs the body in a file cabinet. What now? That’s easy too. You get out quickly and call the police. In between those scenarios, we have a vast range of complicated situations to which people will react differently. Some are easier to solve than others.

A key consideration is how serious the ethical offense is. This is important because there needs to be some proportion between the unethical behavior and the response. Not all ethical offenses are equal. Taking a paper clip, while it could be strictly construed as “taking company property,” doesn’t really fall into the same league as someone who would take cases of company supplies.

Another consideration is your personal circumstances. A 20-something worker with no family or financial responsibilities can afford to take more drastic action. A 40-something person with a sick spouse and two kids facing college needs to be more sure that the action in question really warrants the response. The individual’s circumstances don’t change the ethical evaluation of the act, but they do have a bearing on the risk the person is willing to take to correct it.

Whether it’s a personal failure or an institutional failure is another large factor. If my boss is doing something wrong — and it doesn’t affect me directly — that might be something I’m content to leave between my boss, his conscience, and the company. Or I may decide I don’t want to work for someone like that. If the company is doing something I consider unethical, then I may have to consider whether I want to stay there.

Few companies are perfect, and in almost every place I’ve worked I’ve encountered things I felt were pretty close to the edge of being unethical. In one instance where I felt the ethical lapses were too overwhelming, I just quit. In another, I spoke up — often — which earned me two weeks of pay and a one-way ticket to the unemployment office.

In all of the others, I’ve been fortunate. I’ve spoken up and people listened. Or, if asked to do something I’ve had misgivings about, I’ve outlined my misgivings and explained “I don’t feel comfortable doing that.” Of course, in every situation I’ve been able to make a solid logical case for why I felt it was wrong. This, as I always told my students, was the best reason for studying ethics: to be able to make your case in a reasonable and defensible way. I still recommend it heartily.

The bottom line is that there is no cookie-cutter answer. You need to make your own evaluation of the situation — although others can provide some guidance — and you must decide for yourself the best response that satisfies your ethical sensibilities.

Drop me a line at ethics_matters@infoworld.com or join our Ethics Matters forum at www.infoworld.com/forums/ethics .