• Computing Cases has experimented with a method for displaying a case that takes advantage of online features such as hyperlinking. The three cases featured (Therac-25, Hughes Aircraft, and Machado) provide excellent templates for developing your own case. They, typically, provide an abstract, case narrative, socio-technical system analysis, supporting document, perspective pieces, and short ethical discussions. The focus is on computer ethics.
• Online Ethics provides a wide variety of cases. Of special interest are the cases developed by graduate students that reflect their experiences in research ethics. These cases normally provide the case narrative, a commentary written by the graduate student who is the author of the case, and a commentary by one or more of the ethicists participating in the graduate research ethics workshop held through the auspices of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.
• Adopt an orphan. The University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez Center for Ethics in the Professions has a number of case drafts displayed at its website. These come from faculty development workshops or from students who have developed cases in ethics workshops and classes. These provide only the bare narrative. Your group may choose to adopt an orphan by taking one of these narrratives and building upon it through a socio-technical analysis or through links to supporting information online. These cases represent issues vital to students and instructors in business, science, and engineering. Developing one into a full blown case study would represent an excellent investment of your time.
• The National Society of Professional Engineers publishes cases that have been brought to and discussed by its Board of Ethical Review. The NSPE BER cases go all the way back to the 1960's and provide invaluable insights into how engineers interpret and use their codes of ethics. Each case has a summary, a question to be answered by the BER's deliberations, a list of relevant code provisions, a discussion of the case in terms of these provisions and a concluding decision. Occasionally, the BER does not reach complete agreement on cases and publishes a minority decision. Your group could adopt a BER case to this assignment by completing its research, identifying key decision points, and providing an analysis of the case's underlying socio-technical system.
• Finally, two Connexions modules devoted to the Biomatrix and Toysmart cases provides tables and templates to help you along on the process of analyzing your case. They set forth exercises and tables designed to help you work through the four stages of problem-solving based on an analogy between ethics and design problems. These are (1) problem specification, (2) solution generation, (3) solution testing, and (4) solution implementation.

Learning Basic and Intermediate Moral Concepts

• Below is a media file that provides a summary of the basic and intermediate moral concepts that play a key role in business and engineering ethics. (Many of them also apply to research ethics.) This summary, in table form, will help you in forming your case. Which concepts arise in the case you are considering? Can you reform or rewrite the case to bring out other concepts?
• Examples of Basic Moral Concepts: Rights, Duties, Goods, and Virtues.
• Examples of Intermediate Moral Concepts: Conflict of Interest, Confidentiality, Free Speech, Informed Consent, Privacy, Intellectual Property, etc.
• Cases provide an excellent way of learning how these basic and intermediate moral concepts fit into the real world.

This module is designed to help you learn ethics by preparing and analyzing ethics cases.

• Discussing cases will help you learn about basic and intermediate moral concepts. Studying several cases helps you develop a repertoire of examples of different degrees and kinds of instantiations of these concepts in real situations. Discussing these cases and comparing them to one another helps you to develop paradigmatic examples of the concepts and then understand more problematic instances by establishing their relations to the paradigms through analogical reasoning. This process, called by some "prototyping" more accurately reflects the way we understand and use these thick concepts than does the process of formally defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. (See Michael Pritchard, Reasonable Children, and Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination. For a clear and useful explanation of relating problematic cases to paradigms (what they call "line drawing problems"), see Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins, Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases (2000) Wadsworth: 45-52.
• Cases provide the means of converting the freestanding ethics course into an ethics laboratory where you practice decision-making under conditions that mirror real world situations to the greatest degree possible.
• By helping us to develop cases, you keep our ethics program, in all its aspects, as up to date and relevant as possible. Many of these cases will be integrated into the College of Business Administration Ethics Bowl competition.

In this module you will carry out the following activities:

• Study and respond to a taxonomy that spells out different types of ethics cases.
• Receive advice on how to choose, prepare, write, and analyze your case.
• Study different templates for writing and analyzing your case. For example, the template (=procedures) for developing cases used by Dr. Huff at the Computing Cases website provides an excellent model for developing historical, thick cases. Dr. Huff places the development of a socio-technical system analysis at the center of his case writing and analyzing method.
• You will receive advice on how to develop a poster presentation on your case study and your analysis.

Michael Davis in Ethics and the University (1999) Routledge: 143-174 provides a comprehensive discussion of how the field of practical and professional ethics employs the case study method of teaching.

• He discusses how law schools began to use discussion of legal decisions (law cases) to teach the law.
• Professors presented these cases using the "Socratic Method" or what has also been termed as "testing to destruction." Aggressive questioning is used to get students accustomed to the pressures of making a legal argument in an adversarial context in court. The Socratic Method has never been successfully used in teaching business because questions are not used by managers as weapons in a legal context but as means for gathering the information necessary for making informed decisions.
• Davis also discusses how the Harvard Business School adopted the legal model of teaching by case discussion but quickly changed this methodology to reflect better the underlying dynamics of the business situation.
• Philosophers have also used cases to clarify, rhetorically support, or advance a position in a philosophical controversy. Deciding whether to keep the promise you made to the village chief (on his deathbed) to use his inheritance to build a statute of him or to buy the village children much needed shoes helps to point out ethical conflicts and to advance a theory as a more effective way of addressing these conflicts. The dilemma that Jim in the Jungle faces (made famous by Bernard Williams) that is portrayed in the Mountain Terrorist module also provides an example of this kind of puzzle case.
• Ethics cases began to emerge when physicians brought practical and difficult decisions raising ethical issues to philosophical ethicists for discussion and counsel. These case have also undergone different transformations as they have been used to promote learning and discussion in the different areas of practical and professional ethics.

1. Long (and very long) v. short (and very short)
2. Documents (or pseudo-documents) v. summary
3. Single perspective v. several perspectives
4. Narrative v. dialogue
5. Pure fact v. descriptive commentary
6. Realistic (hypothetical) v. real (actual)
7. Stories v. problems
8. You (agent) v. they (judge)
9. Would v. should
10. Top v. bottom
11. Success (the positive) v. failure (the negative)
12. Single issue (poor) v. multi-issue (rich)
13. Single stage v. multi-stage
14. Ordinary v. technical language
15. Personal v. policy
16. Living v. frozen

Case Taxonomy (Taken from Huff and Frey)

• Thick vs. Thin Cases: Thin cases are useful for abstracting a single point and focusing work on that point. Thick cases can give the student practice in making ethical decisions in the full context of the messy real world.
• Historical vs. Hypothetical: Historical cases are based on actual experience in the field. The Therac-25, Ford Pinto, Hughes Aircraft, and Machado cases are all historical. these provide the sort of excitement and immediate relevance that help students to recognize the importance of ethical enquiry. On the other hand, cases that are hypothetical, fictional, or abstract remove much of the impact of the historical case, though they allow the case writer the freedom to structure, abstract and focus the discussion on precisely the issues of concern. Harvard Business cases are generally thick and historical. Useful--in fact excellent--for in-depth study, they present difficulties for those interested in directing shorter activities.
• Good vs. Bad News cases: The tendency in ethics cases is to have only bad news cases in which some bad outcome occurs because of poor choices. These cautionary tales do grab students' imaginations but the asymmetrical emphasis on bad news gives the impression that good--or even decent--action is impossible, rare, and heroic. Bad news cases should be balanced with cases of morally exemplary scientists and engineers as well as with good choices toward good outcomes made by ordinary scientists and engineers.
• Big vs. Small News Cases: Bad news cases are frequently big news cases; bad news is more sensational and often more newsworthy. Bad news cases are also rare events which make them big news. But these cases frequently present students with a spectacle which, while interesting, precludes involvement. On the other hand, small news cases are about the everyday decisions that scientists and engineers make in the way they handle reporting, data collection , process management, personnel and other day-to-day issues. So big news cases are more sensational and exciting; little news cases are more appropriate to the day-to-day ethical situations that students are likely to face.
• From Huff, C. W. and Frey, W. (2005) "Moral pedagogy and practical ethics" Science and Engineering Ethics Vol. 11, 1-20.)

Choosing Your Case

• Tie your case to areas that interest you and tie directly to your research.
• Chose narratives that raise an ethical issue such as how to mitigate or prevent harm, how to resolve value conflicts, how to balance and respect different stakeholder rights, how to balance out conflicting elements of a socio-technical system, and how to transform a dysfunctional organization into an ethical organization.
• Choose a case that can be built out of readily accessible information. Looking carefully at the case's socio-technical system can help you identify and assess information needs.
• Your case should interest and engage you. You and your group should find preparing it a good investment of your time, energy, and expertise.

Structuring Your Case

• Abstract: Begin your case with a short paragraph that summarizes or outlines the narrative events. It should draw the reader in.
• Historical Narrative: Here, in about 5 to 10 pages, you should detail the "story" of your case. Elements in a narrative or story include a beginning, middle, and end. Protagonists or main characters confront difficulties or obstacles. (This is called the agon in Greek.) At the end of your case, the reader should be clear about how successful the protagonist dealt with the agon and the antagonists.
• Socio-Technical Analysis The case narrative unfolds in a particular context called a socio-technical system. Identify the components of your case's STS. Generally these include hardware, software, physical surroundings, stakeholders, procedures, laws, and information systems. Summarize your STS in a table. Then unpack it in a detailed analysis. Frequently, you will find the conflict in your case's narrative in the form of conflicts between values embedded in the STS.
• Participant Perspectives: If you were detailing the Enron case, you would identify a key decision point and then weave a mini-narrative around it. For example, an important moment occurred when Enron decided to implement mark-to-market accounting. Invent a dialogue where this was discussed and reenact the reasons the eventually led to the decision.
• Ethical Perspective Pieces: The cases prepared by graduate students in APPE's seminar in research ethics were followed by commentaries by the authors and the ethicists who directed the seminar. They explore ethical issues in the context of the case's narrative in issues such as privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent. These ethical perspective pieces can be drawn out into a full blow analysis that follows a framework such as (1) problem specification, (2) solution generation, (3) solution testing, and (4) solution implementation.
• Chronology: A table outline in chronological order the key events of the case helps you and your reader stay on track.

Analyzing Your Case

1. Do a Socio-Technical Analysis: Use the examples found at m14025 to get you started. The STS will help you identify key problems.
2. Specify Your Problem: Look for conflicts between the values embedded in the STS. Look also for harmful consequences in the present, the short term future, and the long term future.
3. Generate a Solution List. Refine that Solution List: Work on changing and rebalancing elements in the STS to resolve the conflict or harmful consequences you scoped when specifying the problem.
4. Test Your Solutions: Use the Ethics Tests (reversibility, harms/benefits, and publicity) plus code and values tests to test your solution. Rank them.
5. Implement Your Solution: Using the feasibility test as a check list, identify possible resource, interest, and technical constraints that could impede the implementation of your solution.

Advice for Preparing a Poster on Your Case

• Your Objective: Develop a Poster that captures the case's narratives and summarizes the different stages of a case analysis framework. In the figure below, we have appended an excellent poster presentation developed by Dr. Carlos Rios.
• Dimensions: Your poster should print out onto a piece of paper two feet by three feet. It should be available digitally in ppt format (either version 2003 or 2007).
• Due Date: May 1 for presentation in class either May 1 or May 8.
• Content: (1) summary of key ethically relevant facts; (2) highlight of the dominant elements of the case's socio-technical system; (3) an analysis of the case that includes problem definition, solutions generated, solution testing (in the form of a solution evaluation matrix), and a plan for implementing the solution over situational constraints; (4) Your names; (5) items that will help visually portray case elements such as flow charts and pictures.
• Make your case visually interesting and choose images that capture the essence of the concepts you are portraying. Be daring and exciting here.
• Practice presenting from your poster. And have fun!