Eth301

TUI University

Morgan P. Brooks

Business Ethics/ETH301

Case Assignment #1

Professor:

Dr. SJ Guignard

Introduction

Over the years thousands of Soldiers, Sailors, Sailors, Airman and Marines have fallen as casualty of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The results of our wars have been devastating on the military and government; and most of all our family and friends. A picture, sometimes a letter or something as simple as the last pleasant memory of our loved one is all we have to hold onto after they have passed. Normally when a service member is killed in the line of duty, his/her parents request from the military and receive all of their belongings, including personal correspondence. Until recently, this was never challenged. Justin Ellsworth’s Parents should not have been given access to his Yahoo email account. This paper offers three justifications defending Yahoo’s decision by visiting the utilitarian and deontological considerations surround this publically debated controversy.

Setting Precedence

Many legal experts say Yahoo acted correctly. It denied the family's informal request and only yielded under court order. "I would hope that the Yahoo! position here would become a trade practice - that e-mail would only be released if a judge approved it," says Gerald Ferrera, executive director of the Cyberlaw Center at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. (Leach 2005) If Yahoo would have allowed Justin’s Parents to access his email account outright, precedence would have been set and eventually other privacy compromises could be expected. As Dr. Gold explains in the Ethic: An Integration PowerPoint (n.d.), “The decision (or action) is right if it maximizes happiness for the greatest number of people over the long term, given that everyone’s happiness is of equal value.” Therefore, the utilitarian considerations are simple. Based on the cost/benefit analysis of privacy rights, one could argue that any degradation could in fact lead...