Notes on Ethics Class

While each of us weighs ethical decisions every day, ethics is not something many of us think about on a daily basis — at least not consciously. Over the first few weeks of this class, the things that stand out to me are the two films that we watched, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and The Insider.

For me, the Enron film served to solidify opinions that I already held about that scandal, that it exemplified an almost total lack of ethics. The upped management was all about doing whatever it took to make as much money for themselves as possible and they had no concern whatsoever for their customers and front-line employees.

I wonder if corruption and ethical lapses are more likely when dealing with something as intangible as energy commodities? Is corruption more likely in the banking and insurance industries more so than in, say, the auto industry? In the auto industry at the end of the day, you have to have a car, a tangible product. Obviously, all those industries have had their problems of late, but I am of the opinion that these intangible products lend themselves to chicanery.

With The Insider, a saw more shades of gray, more examples of the seven layers coming into conflict with one another. With both films, I saw how much we have invested in our jobs and our employers. Do we rely too much on them for things like health insurance and retirement funds? Does that grant employers too much power over our lives? Or should we expect more from our jobs and our employers? Should they mirror our own ethics? Do they already? Lots of questions!