The Ethical Dilemma
The ethical dilemma of the case is confidentiality. The case study I selected to explore this dilemma is the massive confidentiality breach that happened at Dubsmash in 2018, where millions of user account details were compromised after hackers infiltrated the company's database. In this case, the main ethical conflict is the company's failure to explain what led to the breach. This ethical dilemma can be analyzed using several ethical systems to bring sensitivity and method to the human task of decision making.
Kant's Deontological Theory
Deontology is an ethical theory that applies rules to differentiate right from wrong. According to Kant, ethical actions should follow the simple universal moral laws such as avoidance of lies and stealing. As outlined by Misselbrook (2013), Kant devised a formulation in this theory to guide his reasoning. This formulation stated that before resorting to action, one should ask themselves if it would be right if everyone else took such an action. For example, before deciding to lie, one should ask themselves what the repercussions would be if everyone else lied. By asking themselves that question, people would realize that there would be no constructive dealings that could be done, and as such, lying would be avoided. In relation to the case of Dubsmash, the company had the option to explain what happened but decided to plainly avoid explaining to its users the events that led to the breach and only responded by encouraging them to change their passwords. Kant's theory would have scrutinized this action by asking whether it is right or wrong and what would happen if everybody decided not to offer any explanation that would help regain the confidence of the affected parties. Hence, it would have been decided that an explanation should be offered to the affected users.
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Aristotle's virtue-based approach
Aristotle posited that individuals are most likely to make virtuous choices when faced with ethical challenges only if they continuously practice virtuous habits. Unlike Kant, Aristotle's approach does not rely on rules. Rather, it uses virtue ethics as a guide for individuals to use in resolving ethical dilemmas. In this theory, there are four primary virtues that all the other moral virtues depend on, and they comprise temperance, practical wisdom, justice, and courage. Courage is seen as the most dominant virtue of all the other virtues as it is through it that all the others can be performed (Papouli, 2018). Aristotle stated that a courageous person could make a difficult choice as long as it is the right one, despite being faced with threats or challenges. Dubsmash did not seem to have the courage to do the right thing of explaining to its users what had happened, even if that meant that it would lose its customer base if the breach were as a result of its negligence. By employing this theory, Dubsmash would have chosen to do the difficult, right thing of owning up and promising changes in the future.
John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism
In his classical text, Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill discusses morality as a system of social rules. People tend to label an action to be either morally right or wrong based on whether it should be sanctioned through public disapproval, formal punishment, or other internal sanctions (Stuart, 1963). Hence, this theory views morality as a social practice rather than autonomous self-determination through reasoning. Therefore, an action might be the right one to take, but one is not necessarily morally obliged to do it. Dubsmash might have been right to decide to go silent on the causes of the database breach based on reasons that it did not want to be known to the public, but from a moral view, it was not obliged to keep silent. Rather, being accountable and honest to the customers would have been the morally correct thing to do.
References
Misselbrook, D. (2013). An A–Z of medical philosophy. British Journal of General practice . Doi: 10.3399/bjgp13X665422
Papouli, E. (2018). Aristotle's virtue ethics as a conceptual framework for the study and practice of social work in modern times. European Journal of Social Work. Doi: 10.1080/13691457.2018.1461072
Stuart, M. J. (1963). The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill . Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Retrieved from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://iep.utm.edu/mill-eth/
