Tests over ethics for a corporation always crack me up. Questions like “Is it ever okay to steal?” are asked with a straight face and at the end your answer is graded for being either right or wrong.
It occured to me after glancing over a corporate ethics test the other night that the morality that is desired is the sort that protects the company. There are no questions about what to do if you learn someone above you is doing things they shouldn’t be but making money for the company.
It is this basic imposition of values; of asking people ethical questions that have an expected answer which may or may not work for them personally that I find to be just another symptom of a corrupt society. It isn’t ethics that are being tested, it is an effort to get people to APPEAR to be ethical–an effort to INSTILL ethics of a certain kind–the kind that benefit the company and not the individual.
What happens more often than not is that people learn to lie such that they appear ethical without really understanding the hows or whys of a given question. They have no ethics themselves PER SE, so the questions do no affect them particularly. If you have to lie to pass the test, so be it. The ends justify the means.
Institutions encourage us to appear to be something we are not necessarily. It’s just one more example of how our thinking is pre-canned for us and how we are expected to negate our own values and thoughts so that we can make a few bucks and maybe live a little bit more comfortably.
Philosophy isn’t encouraged by society at large; if anything it is discouraged. It is my opinion that these sorts of ethics tests are just one more symptom of this. What do you guys think?