Subject Code : MGMT6023
Country : Australia

Assignment Task

Case Scenario 1:

Imagine that you are the fund manager for a hedge fund that has been underperforming against your less ethical competitors. You employ around 35 staff and you know that the local job market is becoming more difficult for employees in your field of work. One of your staff comes to you with the suggestion to invest in the following start up that claims to be able to manipulate an unaware target by tracking their social media activity and presenting them with tailored advertisements. The pitch is as follows. What would be the ethical thing for you to do in this case? Should you invest in this technology?

You don’t have to be a hostile foreign power to covertly influence people on Facebook. For as little as $29, a U.K. startup called The Spinner will individually target a special someone in your life with a barrage of Facebook ads subtly designed to influence their behavior, whether it’s persuading a spouse to initiate sex more often, or swaying a troublesome co-worker to quit their job.

“We’re giving these capabilities to the common man,” said Spinner’s spokesman, who gives his name as Elliot Shefler. “With a credit card you can target a specific individual and brainwash them with a specific message.” The Spinner has been called a real life Inception, and “the Cambridge Analytica of sex.” It began drumming up press attention last year with its promised brainwashing ability, and today the service claims to have racked up thousands of satisfied customers. Users can request a custom campaign, or select from 10 ready-made ad runs like “Propose Marriage,” “Stop Drinking,” and the (supposedly) best-selling “Initiate Sex” campaign. After onboarding your target, which requires luring them into clicking on a special link, the ersatz brainwashing begins.

Over the next 90 days, The Spinner promises the target will be exposed to 10 different promoted articles a total of 180 times, each story picked to subtly plant and reenforce

the chosen message. A wife targeted with the “Initiate Sex” campaign, for example, will see an ad linking to a 2011 Woman’s Day article titled “9 Ways to Initiate Sex”; a Family Life story called “Why Sex Is So Important to Your Husband”; and a Marriage.com article, “The Importance of Sex For a Happy Marriage,” among others in that vein.

Other campaigns are designed to get a loved one to stop smoking, program a soon-to-be former spouse to settle divorce proceedings out of court, or, oddly, to urge a gambler to get to the nearest casino and play the slot machines. For a little more money, the Spinner will also design a bespoke campaign. Shefler claimed some clients wanted to deliver ads involving specific sex acts, and that he’s accepted hundreds seeking to bring back a former lover through Facebook.

“There are around 400 targets that are exposed to the Bring Me Back My Ex campaign," Shefler claimed. “You’d be surprised how many campaigns deal with romance and relationships and sex. You don’t want to know.”

The Spinner is the first business to monetize something called “Facebook sniper targeting.” While most of the focus on Facebook has been on its power to place an ad in front of hundreds or thousands of eyeballs within a narrow demographic, sniper targeting is more personal, delivering a custom message to an audience of one. Properly executed, the target never knows they were singled out. After all, even the most eerily-apt Facebook ad is easily dismissed as a product of the platform’s sophisticated algorithms.

 

Case Scenario 2:

Imagine you are the CEO of a chain of 35 elderly care facilities. Your organisation is part of a larger private sector health organisation that has traditionally been not for profit but increasingly your parent company expects to see a profit being made.

You have noticed a trend in the industry towards using robots as part of the care responsibilities for patients.

You have received several visits and briefings from the makers of such devices, who suggest that they can decrease anxiety in many patients. They also hint that they can reduce the number of staff needed to staff such facilities (staffing is one of the biggest running costs in such facilities).

The reports from facilities that have started using such robots are positive but there are ethical concerns (below).

Faced with this emerging technology and pressures from the board to reduce costs, what would be the ethical thing for you to do in this case?

“We started using it with the residents and a lot of them think it’s real,” says Kathy Craig, a therapist at a care facility. “They’ll bark at it, they'll pet it, they'll sing to it. We find it works better with people with dementia because if the residents are aware that it’s not real, we find that sometimes they don’t engage with it as much.”

Craig thinks it’s a useful tool for residents who are antisocial, agitated, or sad.

“There’s a pretty large body of evidence to show that interacting with animals can help things like lower blood pressure, reduce depression, reduce subjective pain, decrease the time it takes to recover from chronic ailments,” says Dr. Geoffrey Lane, the psychologist who brought Paro to the Livermore hospital three years ago. He says watching a particularly difficult patient interact with live therapy dogs was the reason he brought the robot to the hospital in the first place.

However, not everyone is on the same page as Dr. Lane. Shannon Vallor is a virtue ethicist and philosophy professor at Santa Clara University. She studies the ways our

habits influence the development of our moral character, and she thinks there are a few ethical issues to worry about when using carebots.

“People have demonstrated a remarkable ability to transfer their psychological expectations of other people’s thoughts, emotions, and feelings to robots,” Vallor says.

Nurses and therapists at the Livermore V.A. don’t explicitly tell the patients Paro the seal is a robot. They play along with questions about where it lives and what type of fish it eats. Vallor says with dementia patients, the line between reality and imagination can already be blurred, but that “we should worry about it with people who are in the facility for other reasons, who are lonely and who want to feel like somebody cares about them.”

And there’s another problem. It has to do with us, the people who are actually doing the caring.

“My question is what happens to us, what happens to our moral character and our virtues in a world where we increasingly have more and more opportunities to transfer our responsibilities for caring for others, to robots?" Vallor asks. "And where the quality of those robots increasingly encourages us to feel more comfortable with doing this, to feel less guilty about it, to feel in fact maybe like that's the best way that we can care for our loved ones?”

She says that caring is really hard, even for the most well-meaning human beings.

“At a certain point we just run out of emotional resources, and at that point both the human caregiver and the person they are caring for is at risk. The robots are reliable, the robots are trustworthy, we don’t have to worry that the robots are going to get burned out, stressed out, that they are going to lose their patience, and we have to worry about that with human caregivers.”

 

Assessment 1 - Case Analysis

The first assignment gives you a chance to apply the normative ethical theories we have covered to an actual case example. It is designed to allow to you to demonstrate your understanding of the ethical questions and approaches we have covered, to demonstrate the ability to think philosophically and critically and to apply this to the kind of case scenario that leaders and organisations face.

In other words: What would each of the three normative theories we have covered in class (utilitarian, Kantian, and virtue ethics) have to say about potential the actions in this case study? How would each theory evaluate these actions ethically?

 

Students have the choice to write on either:

1. An ethically difficult situation they have come across in their own leadership experience (either something they faced themselves or something they have seen a leader face)

2. An ethically difficult situation that they expect to face in their future leadership career

3. An ethically difficult situation for a leader taken from the news currently or recently (the past 3 months).

You are encouraged to contact the Unit Coordinator to describe your chosen case before starting the assessment so that you can be sure it gives you sufficient scope to write on and address the assessment criteria.

 

Your assignment should include:

  • a 300 word summary of the scenario at the start of the paper (not included in the word count)
  • a description of what makes the situation ethically complicated (that is, why it is not obvious what the ethically correct thing to do is)
  • a description of the ethically relevant features and problems in the situation - that is, which of the tenets and ideas covered in the course apply
  • a detailed explanation of what each of the three ethical theories we have covered might say about the situation or what aspects and elements of ethics and leadership are in play in the scenario
  • what you think is the right course of action and how you would approach this
  • finally, and most importantly, why this is your chosen course of action.

Bear in mind that the objective of this assignment is not simply to identify and name the correct course of action - this assignment is as much about your reasons for acting, what factors you consider, what the key approaches covered in the course might have to say about your approach (i.e. consider what are the likely potential criticisms of your approach and how would you respond to these?) and how you decide what not to consider.

 

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  • Posted on : February 07th, 2023
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