According to the article “Working for Ethically Complicated Organizations”, no company or organization can be considered perfectly ethical since we live in a interconnected economy. Then, how to assess an organization’s ethics ? I think while there is some common conception of what can be considered ethical, it gets pretty blurry once we get into the details. If we look at the case of Facebook, their main ethical dilemma is information privacy, and what is ethical to do with the personal information that they have ? From there, drawing the line of what is acceptable is no easy task, especially since contradicting principles apply in some cases (for instance, if Facebook had the potential to detect mentally unhealthy people from their online activity, should they reveal that to healthcare professionals or governmental institutions ? One might say that doing so would be an an unacceptable violation of privacy, but on the other hand, are Facebook responsible for a suicide that might have been prevented by divulging that mental health data ?)
Since it’s all very subjective, I think the best we can do is stand true to what we believe is right, not necessarily by taking drastic action such as refusing a job in a company such as Facebook, but at least by acknowledging the ethical dilemma involved, and trying our best to lead the organization to improve on these topics. Especially as future engineers, managers or executives, we can build ourselves a larger platform than many to voice our ethical concerns and take actions for our organization’s improvement.
