Dear Luke,
I’m writing to give you advice and guidance regarding the situation that you briefed me about. Please take into consideration the interests of our company in your further actions. The good of our company will translate eventually in all of our benefits. Let me present the position of our department in the following advisory.
As member of the project, you are privy to the fact that the construction of the store would decrease the property values of the surrounding neighborhood. Your brother is currently considering selling his property in the said neighborhood. Our company plans to publicly announce the project one month from now.
You are aware that disclosing this non-public information to any party outside of the company can lead to business transactions which will be illegal.
Issue
You believe that you have been drawn into an ethical dilemma. On one hand, you know you owe follow the policies and instructions of your company. You also know that disobedience will border on insider trading which is a crime. On the other hand, you find it against your morals that the company is building an adult entertainment store and you feel that is not wrong to warn people of this misdeed, especially if one of them is your brother.
Analysis
For our counsel, we would like to cite from the ethical perspectives of the Golden Rule and Virtue Ethics.
Golden Rule
This states that we should treat others in the way we want others to treat us. Imagine that you are the CEO of our company. I would surmise that you also wouldn’t want any of your employees to violate company policies and instructions just because they don’t agree with them. If such a case would be tolerated, others will also be encouraged to do the same and company discipline would be severely compromised.
We understand your position that you consider the project to be promoting pornography in an otherwise decent neighborhood and we can also assume that if ever you were the CEO, you wouldn’t initiate such a project. The Golden Rule then may not apply with you because you can claim that you will never do what the company has done.
But let’s also consider that CEO’s do make mistakes which you may also be capable of if you happen to be one. If you did make a mistake and the damage had been done, all CEO’s expect that their employees would still support them until there is a recovery. It is not for employees to penalize CEO’s. That is the responsibility of the board of directors. Company employees need to be unified regardless of up’s and down’s in the business. We would like to assume that you also desire that if you were the CEO; that you would still expect you employees to follow you even in dire situations.
If there would be a leak in non-public information, there can be a danger that the company will be accused of insider trading. As the CEO, we also assume that you would not want any employee to put the company in a legal bind.
Virtue Ethics
We also appeal that you subscribe to virtues which the company and its employees extol. One is integrity in keeping to promises and agreements wherein we refer to your commitment in your employment contract to obey at all times the company’s policies, rules and instructions at work. We understand that you also owe to be protective of your brother’s interest and that is a powerful motivation that clashes to what are asking you to observe but we plead that you abide to your oath as an employee as a matter of integrity and principle.
We also expect you to practice loyalty towards the company who has given you the opportunity and comfort of gainful employment. It has never been amiss in any of its duties to you in terms of compensation and benefits. We ask that while you are still enjoying such a status that you give back to it in terms of loyalty by doing nothing that will bring harm to it. Such loyalty clearly clashes with your loyalty to your brother as a family but may we cite that choosing that as a higher priority is detrimental to our society. We don’t wish that people would be going with their employers every time that family interests are involved. That would be amounting to biting the hands that feed them.
Recommendations
We recommend that you still honor your commitment of obedience and loyalty to the company. We expect that you will not violate the orders on confidentiality of the project. We recognize your moral indignation on the business idea but we expect you to suppress that while you remain to be an employee who enjoys the privileges of gainful livelihood employment. We expect that you will not directly convey to your brother any information about the project.
We respectfully suggest that the most you can do to fulfill your duty to your brother is to suggest in the form of hints that businesses’ actions may affect property values in both positive and negative ways.
