Should Apple Have Disclosed Steve Job's Illness

Should a Company Disclose the Health of Its CEO?

Introduction – The Dilemma

Steve Jobs was a visionary individual who inarguably changed the world with the many products created through his leadership of Apple Inc. His death in 2011 ignited the ongoing debate on whether or not a CEO deserves privacy with respect to health concerns. During the entire duration of his battle with pancreatic cancer from 2003 to 2011, Apple kept his physical conditions in secrecy, thereby adhering to Jobs’ right for privacy (Mintz, 2014). However, this came at the cost to investors and shareholders, who criticized Apple as they were stripped from their right for timely, relevant and material information. Ultimately, Apple was faced with an ethical dilemma in which conforming to the interests of one stakeholder harmed the other.

Mintz’s Ethical Decision-Making Model

Without any regulatory laws that require the disclosure of a CEO’s health (Smith, 2011), it certainly becomes a challenging task to conclude whether Apple acted appropriately or not. The two choices that management faced were whether or not to disclose details of their CEO’s health conditions to the public, and the two main stakeholders were the investors and the family of Steve Jobs. Steven Mintz’s six-step Ethical Decision-Making Model can be used as a tool in analyzing this ethical matter and ultimately obtaining a solution to the dilemma. The Model allows the user to dissect an ethical dilemma into six approachable questions (Mintz, 2014).

The first question Mintz asks is: “What benefits and harms will each course of action produce?” By withholding the information, Jobs and his family benefit at the cost of shareholders and the public. Although Jobs was often seen as a public figure and a global inspiration, he was still a family man beneath his wealth, fame, status and title. As such, he arguably deserved the same level of privacy that all human beings should receive. However, Apple’s decision deprived the...