The case study shall be based on a real-world ethical situation you have personally encountered and about which you, personally, had to make an ethical decision. The case study format must include the following elements:
a. Title of the case
b. Facts regarding the case
c. A one-sentence statement of the ethical problem (If you cannot reduce the problem down to one sentence, you probably do not fully understand the problem, or it may not be an ethical problem at all. Generally, most problems can be reduced down to lying, cheating, or stealing, or some variation thereof.)
d. Possible alternative responses and/or solutions to the ethical problem that were available to you
i. Describe each alternative response and/or solution fully
ii. Analyze each alternative response and/or solution giving the advantages/disadvantages; pros/cons of each
e. Give your recommended alternative and the reasons for choosing it. This alternative may or may not have been the one you chose in the real world. If it was not, please explain why you would act differently today.
The purpose of the case study is for you to review a real ethical problem you actually encountered and to examine how you handled it. Therefore, please choose a case study that actually happened to you. Do not pick an ethical problem that does not apply to you. It is easy to solve other people’s ethical problems, it is not so easy to solve your own. Therefore, do not choose a case study unless it required you to personally make an ethical decision. Do not, for example, describe an ethical problem in your workplace or in your profession and then recommend that your employer or the industry within which you work should correct the problem. It has to be a problem that forced you to make an ethical decision. The assignment is intended to give you the opportunity to review how you make ethical decisions, not to review how someone else makes ethical decisions.
