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3 Key Tips to Writing a Great Ethics Case Study

Table of Contents

Writing an ethics case study is one of the most effective ways to explore an ethical dilemma or research any topic. Studying real-life scenarios and their circumstances might help you understand what went wrong and how to avoid similar problems. Read on if you’re ready to learn about writing an honest and informative ethics case study.

What Is an Ethics Case Study?

An ethics case study analyzes a specific ethical dilemma or situation that presents a moral conflict . Ethics case studies demonstrate how moral concepts apply in real life and how to make ethical decisions. A good ethics case study includes extensive research, numerous views, and an emphasis on the ethical implications of each possible action. It must include enough information about the circumstance and the people involved to let readers understand the intricacy of the issue. In an ethics case study, it’s essential to remain impartial and present all sides of the argument without bias. This case study style encourages critical thinking and meditation on complicated ethical dilemmas rather than persuasion. A well-written ethics case study might make us question our ideals as we meet ethical issues in our personal and professional lives.

Why Write an Ethics Case Study?

Ethics case studies help people understand how moral ideas apply in real life and make good decisions. These case studies help readers grasp complex ethical issues by researching, considering various views , and evaluating the ethical consequences of potential actions. Ethics case studies encourage critical thinking and reflection on complex ethical dilemmas by remaining impartial and presenting all sides of an argument without bias. These case studies enable readers to explore their values and views when facing ethical issues in their personal and professional lives. Ultimately, an ethics case study is a powerful way to help others navigate the complexities of ethical decision-making. Writers can aid their readers in making morally sound decisions by thoroughly understanding the situations and people involved. Doing so may create a more just and equitable world that respects honesty, integrity, and human dignity.

How to Write an Ethics Case Study in Steps

Ethics is a complex and subjective topic, making it challenging to navigate ethical dilemmas. Writing an ethics case study is one way to help people understand the intricacies of ethical decision-making. When writing one, it’s essential to remain impartial and present all sides of the argument without bias. This approach encourages critical thinking and reflection on complex ethical issues.

1. Select an Ethical Issue

Begin by selecting a specific ethical issue that you want to explore in depth. You can recall ethical issues from memory, society, a book, a movie, or a similar experience.

2. Gather Relevant Information

Once you have gathered all relevant information and analyzed the situation thoroughly, it’s time to write your case study. Include details about their backgrounds, motivations, and values. It’s essential to consider the impact on everyone involved, including any potential stakeholders affected by the outcome.

3. Writing Format

The format should include an introduction, background information, an analysis of the issue, alternative solutions, recommendations, and a conclusion.  Remember to remain objective throughout the process and avoid inserting personal biases or opinions.

In conclusion, writing an ethics case study can be a challenging but rewarding task. It allows you to explore complex ethical dilemmas and develop critical thinking skills. However, it is essential to remember that the output must comply with specific rules to communicate your ideas effectively. This means using clear and concise language and avoiding jargon or technical terms whenever possible. Furthermore, when writing an ethics case study, it is essential to remember your target reader.

Abir Ghenaiet

Abir is a data analyst and researcher. Among her interests are artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. As a humanitarian and educator, she actively supports women in tech and promotes diversity.

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Case Studies

More than 70 cases pair ethics concepts with real world situations. From journalism, performing arts, and scientific research to sports, law, and business, these case studies explore current and historic ethical dilemmas, their motivating biases, and their consequences. Each case includes discussion questions, related videos, and a bibliography.

A Million Little Pieces

James Frey’s popular memoir stirred controversy and media attention after it was revealed to contain numerous exaggerations and fabrications.

Abramoff: Lobbying Congress

Super-lobbyist Abramoff was caught in a scheme to lobby against his own clients. Was a corrupt individual or a corrupt system – or both – to blame?

Apple Suppliers & Labor Practices

Is tech company Apple, Inc. ethically obligated to oversee the questionable working conditions of other companies further down their supply chain?

Approaching the Presidency: Roosevelt & Taft

Some presidents view their responsibilities in strictly legal terms, others according to duty. Roosevelt and Taft took two extreme approaches.

Appropriating “Hope”

Fairey’s portrait of Barack Obama raised debate over the extent to which an artist can use and modify another’s artistic work, yet still call it one’s own.

Arctic Offshore Drilling

Competing groups frame the debate over oil drilling off Alaska’s coast in varying ways depending on their environmental and economic interests.

Banning Burkas: Freedom or Discrimination?

The French law banning women from wearing burkas in public sparked debate about discrimination and freedom of religion.

Birthing Vaccine Skepticism

Wakefield published an article riddled with inaccuracies and conflicts of interest that created significant vaccine hesitancy regarding the MMR vaccine.

Blurred Lines of Copyright

Marvin Gaye’s Estate won a lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for the hit song “Blurred Lines,” which had a similar feel to one of his songs.

Bullfighting: Art or Not?

Bullfighting has been a prominent cultural and artistic event for centuries, but in recent decades it has faced increasing criticism for animal rights’ abuse.

Buying Green: Consumer Behavior

Do purchasing green products, such as organic foods and electric cars, give consumers the moral license to indulge in unethical behavior?

Cadavers in Car Safety Research

Engineers at Heidelberg University insist that the use of human cadavers in car safety research is ethical because their research can save lives.

Cardinals’ Computer Hacking

St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa hacked into the Houston Astros’ webmail system, leading to legal repercussions and a lifetime ban from MLB.

Cheating: Atlanta’s School Scandal

Teachers and administrators at Parks Middle School adjust struggling students’ test scores in an effort to save their school from closure.

Cheating: Sign-Stealing in MLB

The Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scheme rocked the baseball world, leading to a game-changing MLB investigation and fallout.

Cheating: UNC’s Academic Fraud

UNC’s academic fraud scandal uncovered an 18-year scheme of unchecked coursework and fraudulent classes that enabled student-athletes to play sports.

Cheney v. U.S. District Court

A controversial case focuses on Justice Scalia’s personal friendship with Vice President Cheney and the possible conflict of interest it poses to the case.

Christina Fallin: “Appropriate Culturation?”

After Fallin posted a picture of herself wearing a Plain’s headdress on social media, uproar emerged over cultural appropriation and Fallin’s intentions.

Climate Change & the Paris Deal

While climate change poses many abstract problems, the actions (or inactions) of today’s populations will have tangible effects on future generations.

Cover-Up on Campus

While the Baylor University football team was winning on the field, university officials failed to take action when allegations of sexual assault by student athletes emerged.

Covering Female Athletes

Sports Illustrated stirs controversy when their cover photo of an Olympic skier seems to focus more on her physical appearance than her athletic abilities.

Covering Yourself? Journalists and the Bowl Championship

Can news outlets covering the Bowl Championship Series fairly report sports news if their own polls were used to create the news?

Cyber Harassment

After a student defames a middle school teacher on social media, the teacher confronts the student in class and posts a video of the confrontation online.

Defending Freedom of Tweets?

Running back Rashard Mendenhall receives backlash from fans after criticizing the celebration of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in a tweet.

Dennis Kozlowski: Living Large

Dennis Kozlowski was an effective leader for Tyco in his first few years as CEO, but eventually faced criminal charges over his use of company assets.

Digital Downloads

File-sharing program Napster sparked debate over the legal and ethical dimensions of downloading unauthorized copies of copyrighted music.

Dr. V’s Magical Putter

Journalist Caleb Hannan outed Dr. V as a trans woman, sparking debate over the ethics of Hannan’s reporting, as well its role in Dr. V’s suicide.

East Germany’s Doping Machine

From 1968 to the late 1980s, East Germany (GDR) doped some 9,000 athletes to gain success in international athletic competitions despite being aware of the unfortunate side effects.

Ebola & American Intervention

Did the dispatch of U.S. military units to Liberia to aid in humanitarian relief during the Ebola epidemic help or hinder the process?

Edward Snowden: Traitor or Hero?

Was Edward Snowden’s release of confidential government documents ethically justifiable?

Ethical Pitfalls in Action

Why do good people do bad things? Behavioral ethics is the science of moral decision-making, which explores why and how people make the ethical (and unethical) decisions that they do.

Ethical Use of Home DNA Testing

The rising popularity of at-home DNA testing kits raises questions about privacy and consumer rights.

Flying the Confederate Flag

A heated debate ensues over whether or not the Confederate flag should be removed from the South Carolina State House grounds.

Freedom of Speech on Campus

In the wake of racially motivated offenses, student protests sparked debate over the roles of free speech, deliberation, and tolerance on campus.

Freedom vs. Duty in Clinical Social Work

What should social workers do when their personal values come in conflict with the clients they are meant to serve?

Full Disclosure: Manipulating Donors

When an intern witnesses a donor making a large gift to a non-profit organization under misleading circumstances, she struggles with what to do.

Gaming the System: The VA Scandal

The Veterans Administration’s incentives were meant to spur more efficient and productive healthcare, but not all administrators complied as intended.

German Police Battalion 101

During the Holocaust, ordinary Germans became willing killers even though they could have opted out from murdering their Jewish neighbors.

Head Injuries & American Football

Many studies have linked traumatic brain injuries and related conditions to American football, creating controversy around the safety of the sport.

Head Injuries & the NFL

American football is a rough and dangerous game and its impact on the players’ brain health has sparked a hotly contested debate.

Healthcare Obligations: Personal vs. Institutional

A medical doctor must make a difficult decision when informing patients of the effectiveness of flu shots while upholding institutional recommendations.

High Stakes Testing

In the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act, parents, teachers, and school administrators take different positions on how to assess student achievement.

In-FUR-mercials: Advertising & Adoption

When the Lied Animal Shelter faces a spike in animal intake, an advertising agency uses its moral imagination to increase pet adoptions.

Krogh & the Watergate Scandal

Egil Krogh was a young lawyer working for the Nixon Administration whose ethics faded from view when asked to play a part in the Watergate break-in.

Limbaugh on Drug Addiction

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh argued that drug abuse was a choice, not a disease. He later became addicted to painkillers.

U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte’s “over-exaggeration” of an incident at the 2016 Rio Olympics led to very real consequences.

Meet Me at Starbucks

Two black men were arrested after an employee called the police on them, prompting Starbucks to implement “racial-bias” training across all its stores.

Myanmar Amber

Buying amber could potentially fund an ethnic civil war, but refraining allows collectors to acquire important specimens that could be used for research.

Negotiating Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy lawyer Gellene successfully represented a mining company during a major reorganization, but failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

Pao & Gender Bias

Ellen Pao stirred debate in the venture capital and tech industries when she filed a lawsuit against her employer on grounds of gender discrimination.

Pardoning Nixon

One month after Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, Gerald Ford made the controversial decision to issue Nixon a full pardon.

Patient Autonomy & Informed Consent

Nursing staff and family members struggle with informed consent when taking care of a patient who has been deemed legally incompetent.

Prenatal Diagnosis & Parental Choice

Debate has emerged over the ethics of prenatal diagnosis and reproductive freedom in instances where testing has revealed genetic abnormalities.

Reporting on Robin Williams

After Robin Williams took his own life, news media covered the story in great detail, leading many to argue that such reporting violated the family’s privacy.

Responding to Child Migration

An influx of children migrants posed logistical and ethical dilemmas for U.S. authorities while intensifying ongoing debate about immigration.

Retracting Research: The Case of Chandok v. Klessig

A researcher makes the difficult decision to retract a published, peer-reviewed article after the original research results cannot be reproduced.

Sacking Social Media in College Sports

In the wake of questionable social media use by college athletes, the head coach at University of South Carolina bans his players from using Twitter.

Selling Enron

Following the deregulation of electricity markets in California, private energy company Enron profited greatly, but at a dire cost.

Snyder v. Phelps

Freedom of speech was put on trial in a case involving the Westboro Baptist Church and their protesting at the funeral of U.S. Marine Matthew Snyder.

Something Fishy at the Paralympics

Rampant cheating has plagued the Paralympics over the years, compromising the credibility and sportsmanship of Paralympian athletes.

Sports Blogs: The Wild West of Sports Journalism?

Deadspin pays an anonymous source for information related to NFL star Brett Favre, sparking debate over the ethics of “checkbook journalism.”

Stangl & the Holocaust

Franz Stangl was the most effective Nazi administrator in Poland, killing nearly one million Jews at Treblinka, but he claimed he was simply following orders.

Teaching Blackface: A Lesson on Stereotypes

A teacher was put on leave for showing a blackface video during a lesson on racial segregation, sparking discussion over how to teach about stereotypes.

The Astros’ Sign-Stealing Scandal

The Houston Astros rode a wave of success, culminating in a World Series win, but it all came crashing down when their sign-stealing scheme was revealed.

The Central Park Five

Despite the indisputable and overwhelming evidence of the innocence of the Central Park Five, some involved in the case refuse to believe it.

The CIA Leak

Legal and political fallout follows from the leak of classified information that led to the identification of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

The Collapse of Barings Bank

When faced with growing losses, investment banker Nick Leeson took big risks in an attempt to get out from under the losses. He lost.

The Costco Model

How can companies promote positive treatment of employees and benefit from leading with the best practices? Costco offers a model.

The FBI & Apple Security vs. Privacy

How can tech companies and government organizations strike a balance between maintaining national security and protecting user privacy?

The Miss Saigon Controversy

When a white actor was cast for the half-French, half-Vietnamese character in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon , debate ensued.

The Sandusky Scandal

Following the conviction of assistant coach Jerry Sandusky for sexual abuse, debate continues on how much university officials and head coach Joe Paterno knew of the crimes.

The Varsity Blues Scandal

A college admissions prep advisor told wealthy parents that while there were front doors into universities and back doors, he had created a side door that was worth exploring.

Providing radiation therapy to cancer patients, Therac-25 had malfunctions that resulted in 6 deaths. Who is accountable when technology causes harm?

Welfare Reform

The Welfare Reform Act changed how welfare operated, intensifying debate over the government’s role in supporting the poor through direct aid.

Wells Fargo and Moral Emotions

In a settlement with regulators, Wells Fargo Bank admitted that it had created as many as two million accounts for customers without their permission.

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• LEAD 200 Dimensions for Ethical Leadership

Writing a Case Study Analysis

• Introduction
• About LEAD 200
• Course Textbook
• Ethical Dialogues
• Ethical Issues and Dilemmas
• Movies & Media
• Reference Works (Encyclopedias, Handbooks, Dictionaries)
• Article Databases
• APA Citation Style
• Presentation Preparation
• Self-Assessments
• Code of Ethics: Professions
• Using ethical concepts to analyze case studies
• A Guide to Writing an Ethical Reasoning
• How to Write an Ethics Paper
• How To Write a Case Study Step-by-Step
• How to Write a Case Study

Examples of Ethical Case Studies/Analyses

• Business Ethics Assignment: Case Analysis Of Johnson & Johnson And Ethical Leadership
• Case Study Application of an Ethical Decision-Making Process for a Fragility Hip Fracture Patient
• Case Study of an Ethical Dilemma
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Annual Review of Ethics Case Studies

What are research ethics cases.

For additional information, please visit Resources for Research Ethics Education

Research Ethics Cases are a tool for discussing scientific integrity. Cases are designed to confront the readers with a specific problem that does not lend itself to easy answers. By providing a focus for discussion, cases help staff involved in research to define or refine their own standards, to appreciate alternative approaches to identifying and resolving ethical problems, and to develop skills for dealing with hard problems on their own.

Research Ethics Cases for Use by the NIH Community

• Theme 24 – Using AI in Research and Ethical Conduct of Clinical Trials (2024)
• Theme 23 – Authorship, Collaborations, and Mentoring (2023)
• Theme 22 – Use of Human Biospecimens and Informed Consent (2022)
• Theme 21 – Science Under Pressure (2021)
• Theme 20 – Data, Project and Lab Management, and Communication (2020)
• Theme 19 – Civility, Harassment and Inappropriate Conduct (2019)
• Theme 18 – Implicit and Explicit Biases in the Research Setting (2018)
• Theme 17 – Socially Responsible Science (2017)
• Theme 16 – Research Reproducibility (2016)
• Theme 15 – Authorship and Collaborative Science (2015)
• Theme 14 – Differentiating Between Honest Discourse and Research Misconduct and Introduction to Enhancing Reproducibility (2014)
• Theme 13 – Data Management, Whistleblowers, and Nepotism (2013)
• Theme 12 – Mentoring (2012)
• Theme 11 – Authorship (2011)
• Theme 10 – Science and Social Responsibility, continued (2010)
• Theme 9 – Science and Social Responsibility - Dual Use Research (2009)
• Theme 8 – Borrowing - Is It Plagiarism? (2008)
• Theme 7 – Data Management and Scientific Misconduct (2007)
• Theme 6 – Ethical Ambiguities (2006)
• Theme 5 – Data Management (2005)
• Theme 4 – Collaborative Science (2004)
• Theme 3 – Mentoring (2003)
• Theme 2 – Authorship (2002)
• Theme 1 – Scientific Misconduct (2001)

For Facilitators Leading Case Discussion

For the sake of time and clarity of purpose, it is essential that one individual have responsibility for leading the group discussion. As a minimum, this responsibility should include:

• Reading the case aloud.
• Defining, and re-defining as needed, the questions to be answered.
• Encouraging discussion that is “on topic”.
• Discouraging discussion that is “off topic”.
• Keeping the pace of discussion appropriate to the time available.
• Eliciting contributions from all members of the discussion group.
• Summarizing both majority and minority opinions at the end of the discussion.

How Should Cases be Analyzed?

Many of the skills necessary to analyze case studies can become tools for responding to real world problems. Cases, like the real world, contain uncertainties and ambiguities. Readers are encouraged to identify key issues, make assumptions as needed, and articulate options for resolution. In addition to the specific questions accompanying each case, readers should consider the following questions:

• Who are the affected parties (individuals, institutions, a field, society) in this situation?
• What interest(s) (material, financial, ethical, other) does each party have in the situation? Which interests are in conflict?
• Were the actions taken by each of the affected parties acceptable (ethical, legal, moral, or common sense)? If not, are there circumstances under which those actions would have been acceptable? Who should impose what sanction(s)?
• What other courses of action are open to each of the affected parties? What is the likely outcome of each course of action?
• For each party involved, what course of action would you take, and why?
• What actions could have been taken to avoid the conflict?

Is There a Right Answer?

Acceptable solutions.

Most problems will have several acceptable solutions or answers, but it will not always be the case that a perfect solution can be found. At times, even the best solution will still have some unsatisfactory consequences.

Unacceptable Solutions

While more than one acceptable solution may be possible, not all solutions are acceptable. For example, obvious violations of specific rules and regulations or of generally accepted standards of conduct would typically be unacceptable. However, it is also plausible that blind adherence to accepted rules or standards would sometimes be an unacceptable course of action.

Ethical Decision-Making

It should be noted that ethical decision-making is a process rather than a specific correct answer. In this sense, unethical behavior is defined by a failure to engage in the process of ethical decision-making. It is always unacceptable to have made no reasonable attempt to define a consistent and defensible basis for conduct.

This page was last updated on Friday, July 26, 2024

• Ethics Cases
• Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
• Ethics Resources

Find case studies and scenarios on a variety of fields in applied ethics.

Cases can also be viewed by the following categories:

For permission to reprint cases, submit requests to [email protected] .

Looking to draft your own case studies?  This template provides the basics for writing ethics case studies in technology (though with some modification it could be used in other fields as well).

A fitness tracker aimed at children raises issues of design ethics, incentives, and more.

Six case studies explore how accessibility intersects with health care, education, and workplace ethics. The cases serve as a foundation for difficult dialogues, in-class discussions, or workshops and should be used by stakeholders involved in disability advocacy, education, health care, and policy-making.

AI-generated text, voices, and images used for entertainment productions and impersonation raise ethical questions.

The importance of academic institutions in shaping the societal narrative is increasingly showcased by constant media exposure and continuous requests for social commentary. This case study outlines effective methodologies of leadership, ethics, and change management within an organization, for the purpose of motivating and engaging stakeholders to empathize with and carry out a shared directive.

How might news platforms and products ensure that ethical journalism on chronic issues is not drowned out by the noise of runaway political news cycles?

Ethical questions arise in interactions among students, instructors, administrators, and providers of AI tools.

In water rights discussions, there is an ethical responsibility to include Indigenous people in both conversations and legislation decisions.

In this business ethics case study, Swedish multinational company IKEA faced accusations relating to child labor abuses in the rug industry in Pakistan which posed a serious challenge for the company and its supply chain management goals.

A dog may be humanity’s best friend. But that may not always be the case in the workplace.

A recent college graduate works in the finance and analytics department of a large publicly traded software company and discovers an alarming discrepancy in sales records, raising concerns about the company’s commitment to truthful reporting to investors. 

• More pages:

• 2.3 Using ethical concepts to analyze case studies

Ethical case analysis is a common exercise for identifying and reasoning about ethical challenges in complex situations. Analyzing ethical case studies with your mentors, colleagues, and peer students also provides opportunities for each participant to articulate her own ethical values and to seek ethical consensus within the group. The Rock Ethics Institute provides a 12-step approach for analyzing ethical case studies. This step-by-step framework includes:

1. State the nature of the ethical issue you’ve initially spotted 2. List the relevant facts 3. Identify stakeholders 4. Clarify the underlying values 5. Consider consequences 6. Identify relevant rights/duties 7. Reflect on which virtues apply 8. Consider relevant relationships 9. Develop a list of potential responses 10. Use moral imagination to consider each option based on the above considerations 11. Choose the best option 12. Consider what could be done in the future to prevent the problem

Application of the 12 steps to an ethics scenario is illustrated in a series of instructional videos .

For those of you who are familiar with engineering design, could you identify the parallel between this ethical reasoning framework and the engineering design process? When we rephrase the 12 steps using the language of design, we might see that both emphasize an iterative process for identifying and solving open-ended challenges (see Figure 4).

Figure 4 A Design-Based Framework for Ethics Case Analysis.

As big data technologies become widely adopted by business and governmental sectors, we find ourselves often confronted by the following question: To what extent can we trust computer algorithms to make ethical decisions for us? Another way to ask this question is: Do algorithms have ethical agency? Ethical agency is the ability to act responsibly according to one’s ethical judgment of right and wrong (MacIntyre, 1999; van der Velden, 2009). For example, adult human beings have ethical agency because they have a sense of what is ethically right. That is, we accept that adults make intentional choices to act ethically or not, and they can be held accountable for their actions. Admittedly, machines (and computers) can be programmed to do things we consider ethically right. For example, we can program an electrical system to turn off the lights when the sensors detect no people in a room. In this case, it is the programmer, not the electrical system, that decides avoiding energy waste is ethically right. The human programmer is able to fully grasp the meanings of and connections between “no people in a room,” “turning off the lights,” and “avoiding energy waste.” However, in the case of big data analysis, the human actors (e.g., authors of the algorithms) may have less grasping of the entire situation because 1) they do not interact directly with the data (the algorithms do so), and 2) they might be working on a tiny proportion of a vast network of interrelated algorithms (Ananny, 2016). Faced with enormously complex systems and incomplete information, the human actors (e.g., researchers and programmers) involved in big data analysis sometimes have to delegate the power of making ethical decisions to algorithms. Yet algorithms are not fully capable of making sense of the patterns they recognize or the impact of their recommendations. Or we can say that algorithms have at the best “partial ethical agency.” The following case study highlights the challenges of letting algorithms with partial ethical agency to make important decisions on behalf of humans.

Identifying potential terrorists with algorithms?

In early 2016, counter-terrorism officials from the federal government met with leaders of giant tech companies in the Silicon Valley to discuss strategies for identifying and preventing terrorism on social networks. Among the proposals was a suggestion for the tech companies to develop a security algorithm that will detect, measure, and flag “radicalization” from social network posts. The federal officials who proposed this algorithm also cited the example of the Facebook suicide prevention mechanisms, which allows Facebook users to report suicidal content to the company.

You could also listen to a discussion about this proposal at WNYC .

Questions for Case Analysis

• What are ethically sound responses to the federal officials’ proposal? Use the 12-step approach or the Design-Based Framework to analyze this case.
• Which of the four ethical concepts (integrity, rights, impact, and epistemic norms) introduced in the above section are applicable to this case?

The Ethics of Data Management

• Introduction

Unit 1: Planning for Data

• Unit 2: Generating Data

Unit 3: Processing Data

Unit 4: using, sharing, and preserving data.

• 1.1 Definitions of data
• 1.2 The ecosystem of data: multiple actors and stakeholders
• 2.1 The research process and relevant actors
• 2.2 Relevant ethical concepts
• 2.4 Overall strategies for ethical data management
• Summary and references

Unit 2: Generating data

• 1. Sources of Data
• 2.1 Poor data practices in the lab
• 2.2 Research culture, proper protocols, and training
• 2.3 Lab notebook
• 2.4 Collective review of data
• 3.1 Human subjects: The Common Rule and IRB
• 3.2 Additional ethical concerns for collecting data from human subjects
• 3.3 Use of animals in research: The Animal Welfare Act and IACUC
• 1. Statistics and Data Integrity
• 2.1 Data fishing and trimming
• 2.2 Image manipulation
• 3.1 Conflict of interest
• 3.2 Interests, (implicit) biases, and uncertainty
• 1.1 The communal, practical, and educational purposes of research
• 1.2 Principles of disseminating research
• 2.1 Intellectual property: copy rights, trade secrets, and patents
• 2.2 Transparency, accountability, and profitability
• 2.3 Data sharing policies from funding agencies and journals
• 2.4 Open access
• 3.1 Methods of data storage
• 3.2 Period of retention
• 3.3 Data security

Unit 5: Big Data

• 1.1 Cognitive questions
• 1.2 The question of risk
• 1.3 The question of justice
• 2. Metadata and Algorithms
• 3. Cloud Computing

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• Terrorism & Violent Extremism
• Introduction & Learning Outcomes
• Corruption - Baseline Definition
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• Deeper Meanings of Corruption
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• Possible Class Structure
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• Appendix: How Corruption Affects the SDGs
• What is Governance?
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• Guidelines for Stand-alone Course
• Corruption and Democracy
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• Causes of Public Sector Corruption
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• Corruption in Public Procurement
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• Responses to Public Sector Corruption
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• Causes of Private Sector Corruption
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• Introduction and Learning Outcomes
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• Teaching Guide
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• Principle of Non-Discrimination
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• Definition of 'Victim'
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• Topic 1. Contemporary issues relating to conditions conducive both to the spread of terrorism and the rule of law
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• Module 16: Linkages between Organized Crime and Terrorism
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• 1. Introducing United Nations Standards & Norms on CPCJ vis-à-vis International Law
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• 1. Definition of Crime Prevention
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• 1. Introducing Aims of Punishment, Imprisonment & Prison Reform
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• 1. Gender-Based Discrimination & Women in Conflict with the Law
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• 3. Who Has Rights in this Situation?
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• 1. Understanding the Concept of Victims of Crime
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• 7. Outlook on Current Developments Regarding Victims
• 8. Victims of Crime and International Law
• 1. The Many Forms of Violence against Children
• 2. The Impact of Violence on Children
• 3. States' Obligations to Prevent VAC and Protect Child Victims
• 4. Improving the Prevention of Violence against Children
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• 6. Addressing Violence against Children within the Justice System
• 1. The Role of the Justice System
• 2. Convention on the Rights of the Child & International Legal Framework on Children's Rights
• 3. Justice for Children
• 4. Justice for Children in Conflict with the Law
• 5. Realizing Justice for Children
• 1a. Judicial Independence as Fundamental Value of Rule of Law & of Constitutionalism
• 1b. Main Factors Aimed at Securing Judicial Independence
• 2a. Public Prosecutors as ‘Gate Keepers’ of Criminal Justice
• 2b. Institutional and Functional Role of Prosecutors
• 2c. Other Factors Affecting the Role of Prosecutors
• Basics of Computing
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• Digital Evidence
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• Knowledge Management
• Legal and Ethical Obligations
• Handling of Digital Evidence
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• Sovereignty and Jurisdiction
• Formal International Cooperation Mechanisms
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• National Capacity and International Cooperation
• Internet Governance
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• Privacy: What it is and Why it is Important
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• Intellectual Property: What it is
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• Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse
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• Cyber Organized Crime: What is it?
• Conceptualizing Organized Crime & Defining Actors Involved
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• Framing the Issue of Firearms
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• International and National Responses
• Typology and Classification of Firearms
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• Parts and Components
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• Authorized & Unauthorized Arms Transfers
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• International Public Law & Transnational Law
• International Instruments with Global Outreach
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• Tools to Support Implementation of Global Instruments
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• The Sustainable Development Goals
• Multilateral & Regional Instruments
• Scope of National Firearms Regulations
• National Firearms Strategies & Action Plans
• Harmonization of National Legislation with International Firearms Instruments
• Assistance for Development of National Firearms Legislation
• Firearms Trafficking as a Cross-Cutting Element
• Organized Crime and Organized Criminal Groups
• Criminal Gangs
• Terrorist Groups
• Interconnections between Organized Criminal Groups & Terrorist Groups
• Gangs - Organized Crime & Terrorism: An Evolving Continuum
• International Response
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• Firearms Related Offences
• Role of Law Enforcement
• Firearms as Evidence
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• Teaching Methods & Principles
• Ethical Learning Environments
• Overview of Modules
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• Table of Exercises
• Basic Terms
• Forms of Gender Discrimination
• Ethics of Care
• Case Studies for Professional Ethics
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• Additional Exercises
• Defining Organized Crime
• Definition in Convention
• Similarities & Differences
• Activities, Organization, Composition
• Thinking Critically Through Fiction
• Excerpts of Legislation
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• Legal Definitions of Organized Crimes
• Criminal Association
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• Criminal Organizations and Enterprise Laws
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• Drug Trafficking
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• Positivism: Environmental Influences
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• Module 12: Prevention of Organized Crime
• Adoption of Organized Crime Convention
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• Crime of Trafficking in Persons
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• Comparing SOM and TIP
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University Module Series: Integrity & Ethics

Module 12: integrity, ethics and law.

  This module is a resource for lecturers  

Case studies.

Choose one or more of the following case studies and lead a discussion which allows students to address and debate issues of integrity, ethics and law. If time allows, let the students vote on which case studies they want to discuss.

For lecturers teaching large classes, case studies with multiple parts and different methods of solution lend themselves well to the group size and energy in such an environment. Lecturers can begin by having students vote on which case study they prefer. Lecturers could break down analysis of the chosen case study into steps which appear to students in sequential order, thereby ensuring that larger groups stay on track. Lecturers may instruct students to discuss questions in a small group without moving from their seat, and nominate one person to speak for the group if called upon. There is no need to provide excessive amounts of time for group discussion, as ideas can be developed further with the class as a whole. Lecturers can vary the group they call upon to encourage responsive participation.

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Introduction: Case Studies in the Ethics of Mental Health Research

Joseph millum.

Clinical Center Department of Bioethics/Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD

This collection presents six case studies on the ethics of mental health research, written by scientific researchers and ethicists from around the world. We publish them here as a resource for teachers of research ethics and as a contribution to several ongoing ethical debates. Each consists of a description of a research study that was proposed or carried out and an in-depth analysis of the ethics of the study.

Building Global Capacity in Mental Health Research

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are more than 450 million people with mental, neurological, or behavioral problems worldwide ( WHO, 2005a ). Mental health problems are estimated to account for 13% of the global burden of disease, principally from unipolar and bipolar depression, alcohol and substance-use disorders, schizophrenia, and dementia. Nevertheless, in many countries, mental health is accorded a low priority; for example, a 2005 WHO analysis found that nearly a third of low-income countries who reported a mental health budget spent less than 1% of their total health budget on mental health ( WHO, 2005b ).

Despite the high burden of disease and some partially effective treatments that can be implemented in countries with weaker healthcare delivery systems ( Hyman et al., 2006 ), there exist substantial gaps in our knowledge of how to treat most mental health conditions. A 2007 Lancet Series entitled Global Mental Health claimed that the “rudimentary level of mental health-service research programmes in many nations also contributes to poor delivery of mental health care” ( Jacob et al., 2007 ). Its recommendations for mental health research priorities included research into the effects of interactions between mental health and other health conditions ( Prince et al., 2007 ), interventions for childhood developmental disabilities ( Patel et al., 2007 ), cost-effectiveness analysis, the scaling up of effective interventions, and the development of interventions that can be delivered by nonspecialist health workers ( Lancet Global Mental Health Group, 2007 ). All of these priorities require research in environments where the prevailing health problems and healthcare services match those of the populations the research will benefit, which suggests that research must take place all around the world. Similarly, many of the priorities identified by the Grand Challenges in Mental Health Initiative require focus on local environments, cultural factors, and the health systems of low- and middle-income countries. All the challenges “emphasize the need for global cooperation in the conduct of research” ( Collins et al., 2011 ).

Notwithstanding the need for research that is sensitive to different social and economic contexts, the trend of outsourcing to medical research to developing countries shows no sign of abating ( Thiers et al., 2008 ). Consequently, a substantial amount of mental health research will, in any case, take place in low- and middle-income countries, as well as rich countries, during the next few years.

The need for local research and the continuing increase in the international outsourcing of research imply that there is a pressing need to build the capacity to conduct good quality mental health research around the world. However, the expansion of worldwide capacity to conduct mental health research requires more than simply addressing low levels of funding for researchers and the imbalance between the resources available in rich and poor countries. People with mental health disorders are often thought to be particularly vulnerable subjects. This may be a product of problems related to their condition, such as where the condition reduces the capacity to make autonomous decisions. It may also result from social conditions because people with mental disorders are disproportionately likely to be poor, are frequently stigmatized as a result of their condition, and may be victims of human rights abuses ( Weiss et al., 2001 ; WHO, 2005a ). As a result, it is vitally important that the institutional resources and expertise are in place for ensuring that this research is carried out ethically.

Discussion at a special session at the 7th Global Forum on Bioethics in Research revealed the perception that many mental health researchers are not very interested in ethics and showed up a lack of ethics resources directly related to their work. This collection of case studies in the ethics of mental health research responds to that gap.

This collection comprises six case studies written by contributors from around the world ( Table 1 ). Each describes a mental health research study that raised difficult ethical issues, provides background and analysis of those issues, and draws conclusions about the ethics of the study, including whether it was ethical as it stood and how it ought to be amended otherwise. Three of the case studies are written by scientists who took part in the research they analyzed. For these cases, we have asked scholars independent of the research to write short commentaries on them. It is valuable to hear how the researchers themselves grapple with the ethical issues they encounter, as well as to hear the views of people with more distance from the research enterprise. Some of the ethical issues raised here have not been discussed before in the bioethics literature; others are more common concerns that have not received much attention in the context of international research. The case studies are intended to both expand academic discussion of some of the key questions related to research into mental health and for use in teaching ethics.

Case studies are an established teaching tool. Ethical analyses of such cases demonstrate the relevance of ethics to the actual practice of medical research and provide paradigmatic illustrations of the application of ethical principles to particular research situations. Concrete cases help generate and guide discussion and assist students who have trouble dealing with ethical concepts in abstraction. Through structured discussion, ethical development and decision-making skills can be enhanced. Moreover, outside of the teaching context, case study analyses provide a means to generate and focus debate on the relevant ethical issues, which can both highlight their importance and help academic discussion to advance.

People working in mental health research can benefit most from case studies that are specific to mental health. Even though, as outlined below, many of the same ethical problems arise in mental health research as elsewhere, the details of how they arise are important. For example, the nature of depression and the variation in effectiveness of antidepressive medication make a difference to how we should assess the ethics of placebo-controlled trials for new antidepressants. Moreover, seeing how familiar ethical principles are applied to one's own research specialty makes it easier to think about the ethics of one's own research. The cases in this collection highlight the commonalities and the variation in the ethical issues facing researchers in mental health around the world.

The current literature contains some other collections of ethics case studies that may be useful to mental health researchers. I note four important collections here, to which interested scholars may want to refer. Lavery et al.'s (2007) Ethical Issues in International Bio-medical Research provides in-depth analyses of ethically problematic research, mostly in low- and middle-income countries, although none of these cases involve mental health. Cash et al.'s (2009) Casebook on Ethical Issues in International Health Research also focuses on research in low- and middle-income countries, and several of the 64 short case descriptions focus on populations with mental health problems. Two further collections focus on mental health research, in particular. Dubois (2007) and colleagues developed short and longer US-based case studies for teaching as part of their “Ethics in Mental Health Research” training course. Finally, Hoagwood et al.'s (1996) book Ethical Issues in Mental Health Research with Children and Adolescents contains a casebook of 61 short case descriptions, including a few from outside the United States and Western Europe. For teachers and academics in search of more case studies, these existing collections should be very useful. Here, we expand on the available resources with six case studies from around the world with extended ethical analyses.

The remainder of this introduction provides an overview of some of the most important ethical issues that arise in mental health research and describes some of the more significant ethics guidance documents that apply.

Ethical Issues in Mental Health Research

The same principles can be applied in assessing the ethics of mental health research as to other research using human participants ( Emanuel et al., 2000 ). Concerns about the social value of research, risks, informed consent, and the fair treatment of participants all still apply. This means that we can learn from the work done in other areas of human subjects research. However, specific research contexts make a difference to how the more general ethical principles should be applied to them. Different medical conditions may require distinctive research designs, different patient populations may need special protections, and different locations may require researchers to respond to study populations who are very poor and lack access to health care or to significant variations in regulatory systems. The ethical analysis of international mental health research therefore needs to be tailored to its particularities.

Each case study in this collection focuses on the particular ethical issues that are relevant to the research it analyzes. Nevertheless, some issues arise in multiple cases. For example, questions about informed consent arise in the context of research with stroke patients, with students, and with other vulnerable groups. To help the reader compare the treatment of an ethical issue across the different case studies, the ethical analyses use the same nine headings to delineate the issues they consider. These are social value, study design, study population, informed consent, risks and benefits, confidentiality, post-trial obligations, legal versus ethical obligations, and oversight.

Here, I focus on five of these ethical issues as they arise in the context of international mental health research: (1) study design, (2) study population, (3) risks and benefits, (4) informed consent, and (5) post-trial obligations. I close by mentioning some of the most important guidelines that pertain to mental health research.

Study Design

The scientific design of a research study determines what sort of data it can generate. For example, the decision about what to give participants in each arm of a controlled trial determines what interventions the trial compares and what questions about relative safety and efficacy it can answer. What data a study generates makes a difference to the ethics of the study because research that puts human beings at risk is ethically justified in terms of the social value of the knowledge it produces. It is widely believed that human subject research without any social value is unethical and that the greater the research risks to participants, the greater the social value of the research must be to compensate ( Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences [CIOMS], 2002 ; World Medical Association, 2008 ). However, changing the scientific design of a study frequently changes what happens to research participants, too. For example, giving a control group in a treatment trial an existing effective treatment rather than placebo makes it more likely that their condition will improve but may expose them to adverse effects they would not otherwise experience. Therefore, questions of scientific design can be ethically very complex because different possible designs are compared both in terms of the useful knowledge they may generate and their potential impact on participants.

One of the more controversial questions of scientific design concerns the standard of care that is offered to participants in controlled trials. Some commentators argue that research that tests therapeutic interventions is only permissible if there is equipoise concerning the relative merits of the treatments being compared, that is, there are not good reasons to think that participants in any arm of the trial are receiving inferior treatment ( Joffe and Truog, 2008 ). If there is not equipoise, the argument goes, then physician-researchers will be breaching their duty to give their patients the best possible care ( Freedman, 1987 ).

The Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) described in the case study by Charles Zeanah was a randomized controlled trial comparing foster care with institutional care in Bucharest, Romania. When designing the BEIP, the researchers wrestled with the issue of whether there was genuine equipoise regarding the relative merits of institutional and foster care. One interpretation of equipoise is that it exists when the professional community has not reached consensus about the better treatment ( Freedman, 1987 ). Childcare professionals in the United States were confident that foster care was superior, but there was no such confidence in Romania, where institutional care was the norm. Which, then, was the relevant professional community?

The equipoise requirement is justified by reference to the role morality of physicians: for a physician to give her patient treatment that she knows to be inferior would violate principles of therapeutic beneficence and nonmaleficence. As a result, the equipoise requirement has been criticized for conflating the ethics of the physician-patient relationship with the ethics of the researcher-participant relationship ( Miller and Brody, 2003 ). According to Miller and Brody (2003) , provided that other ethical requirements are met, including an honest null hypothesis, it is not unethical to assign participants to receive treatment regimens known to be inferior to the existing standard of care.

A subset of trial designs that violate equipoise are placebo-controlled trials of experimental treatments for conditions for which proven effective treatments already exist. Here, there is not equipoise because some participants will be assigned to placebo treatment, and ex hypothesi there already exists treatment that is superior to placebo. Even if we accept Miller and Brody's (2003) argument and reject the equipoise requirement, there remain concerns about these placebo-controlled trials. Providing participants with less effective treatment than they could get outside of the trial constitutes a research risk because trial participation makes them worse off. Moreover, on the face of it, a placebo-controlled trial of a novel treatment of a condition will not answer the most important scientific question about the treatment that clinicians are interested in: is this new treatment better than the old one? Consequently, in situations where there already exists a standard treatment of a condition, it has generally been considered unethical to use a placebo control when testing a new treatment, rather than using the standard treatment as an active-control ( World Medical Association, 2008 ).

Some psychiatric research provides scientific reasons to question a blanket prohibition on placebo-controlled trials when an effective intervention exists. For example, it is not unusual for antidepressive drugs to fail to show superiority to placebo in any given trial. This means that active-control trials may seem to show that an experimental drug is equivalent in effectiveness to the current standard treatment, when the explanation for their equivalence may, in fact, be that neither was better than placebo. Increasing the power of an active-control trial sufficiently to rule out this possibility may require an impractically large number of subjects and will, in any case, put a greater number of subjects at risk ( Carpenter et al., 2003 ; Miller, 2000 ). A 2005 trial of risperidone for acute mania conducted in India ( Khanna et al., 2005 ) was criticized for unnecessarily exposing subjects to risk ( Basil et al., 2006 ; Murtagh and Murphy, 2006 ; Srinivasan et al., 2006 ). The investigators' response to criticisms adopted exactly the line of argument just described:

A placebo group was included because patients with mania generally show a high and variable placebo response, making it difficult to identify their responses to an active medication. Placebo-controlled trials are valuable in that they expose the fewest patients to potentially ineffective treatments. In addition, inclusion of a placebo arm allows a valid evaluation of adverse events attributable to treatment v. those independent of treatment. ( Khanna et al., 2006 )

Concerns about the standard of care given to research participants are exacerbated in trials in developing countries, like India, where research participants may not have access to treatment independent of the study. In such cases, potential participants may have no real choice but to join a placebo-controlled trial, for example, because that is the only way they have a chance to receive treatment. In the Indian risperidone trial, the issue of exploitation is particularly stark because it seemed to some that participants were getting less than the international best standard of care, in order that a pharmaceutical company could gather data that was unlikely to benefit many Indian patients.

This is just one way in which trial design may present ethically troubling risks to participants. Other potentially difficult designs include washout studies, in which participants discontinue use of their medication, and challenge studies, in which psychiatric symptoms are experimentally induced ( Miller and Rosenstein, 1997 ). In both cases, the welfare of participants may seem to be endangered ( Zipursky, 1999 ). A variant on the standard placebo-controlled trial design is the withdrawal design, in which everyone starts the trial on medication, the people who respond to the medication are then selected for randomization, and then half of those people are randomized to placebo. This design was used by a Japanese research team to assess the effectiveness of sertraline for depression, as described by Shimon Tashiro and colleagues in this collection. The researchers regarded this design as more likely to benefit the participants because for legal reasons, sertraline was being tested in Japan despite its proven effectiveness in non-Japanese populations. Tashiro and colleagues analyze how the risks and benefits of a withdrawal design compare with those of standard placebo-controlled trials and consider whether the special regulatory context of Japan makes a difference.

Study Population

The choice of study population implicates considerations of justice. The Belmont Report, which lays out the ethical foundations for the United States system for ethical review of human subject research, says:

Individual justice in the selection of subjects would require that researchers … should not offer potentially beneficial research only to some patients who are in their favor or select only “undesirable” persons for risky research. Social justice requires that distinction be drawn between classes of subjects that ought, and ought not, to participate in any particular kind of research, based on the ability of members of that class to bear burdens and on the appropriateness of placing further burdens on already burdened persons. ( National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1978 )

Two distinct considerations are highlighted here. The first (“individual justice”) requires that the researchers treat people equally. Morally irrelevant differences between people should not be the basis for deciding whom to enroll in research. For example, it would normally be unjust to exclude women from a phase 3 trial of a novel treatment of early-stage Alzheimer disease, given that they are an affected group. Some differences are not morally irrelevant, however. In particular, there may be scientific reasons for choosing one possible research population over another, and there may be risk-related reasons for excluding certain groups. For example, a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in healthy volunteers to examine the acute effects of an antianxiety medication might reasonably exclude left-handed people because their brain structure is different from that of right-handed people, and a study of mood that required participants to forego medication could justifiably exclude people with severe depression or suicidal ideation.

The second consideration requires that we consider how the research is likely to impact “social justice.” Social justice refers to the way in which social institutions distribute goods, like property, education, and health care. This may apply to justice within a state ( Rawls, 1971 ) or to global justice ( Beitz, 1973 ). In general, research will negatively affect social justice when it increases inequality, for example, by making people who are already badly off even worse off. The quotation from the Belmont Report above suggests one way in which research might violate a requirement of social justice: people who are already badly off might be asked to participate in research and so be made worse off. For example, a study examining changes in the brain caused by alcohol abuse that primarily enrolled homeless alcoholics from a shelter near the study clinic might only put at further risk this group who are already very badly off. An alternative way in which research can promote justice or injustice is through its results. Research that leads to the development of expensive new attention deficit hyperactivity disorder medication is likely to do little, if anything, to make the world more just. Research on how to improve the cognitive development of orphaned children in poor environments (like the BEIP) is much more likely to improve social justice.

This last point suggests a further concern about fairness—exploitation—that frequently arises in the context of international collaborative research in developing countries. Exploitation occurs, roughly, when one party takes “unfair advantage” of the vulnerability of another. This means that the first party benefits from the interaction and does so to an unfair extent ( Wertheimer, 1996 ). These conditions may be met in international collaborative research when the burdens of research fall disproportionately on people and institutions in developing countries, but the benefits of research, such as access to new treatments, accrue to people in richer countries. A number of case studies in this collection raise this concern in one way or another. For example, Virginia Rodriguez analyzes a proposed study of the genetic basis of antisocial personality disorder run by US researchers but carried out at sites in several Latin American countries. One of the central objections raised by one of the local national research ethics committees with regard to this study was that there appeared to be few, if any, benefits for patients and researchers in the host country.

Risks and Benefits

Almost all research poses some risk of harm to participants. Participants in mental health research may be particularly susceptible to risk in several ways. First, and most obviously, they may be physically or psychologically harmed as a result of trial participation. For example, an intervention study of an experimental antipsychotic may result in some serious adverse effects for participants who take the drug. Less obvious but still very important are the potential effects of stopping medication. As mentioned above, some trials of psychoactive medications require that patients stop taking the medications that they were on before the trial ( e.g ., the Japanese withdrawal trial). Stopping their medication can lead to relapse, to dangerous behavior (like attempted suicide), and could mean that their previous treatment regimen is less successful when they attempt to return to it. Participants who were successfully treated during a trial may have similar effects if they do not have access to treatment outside of the trial. This is much more likely to happen in research conducted with poor populations, such as the Indian mania patients.

The harms resulting directly from research-related interventions are not the only risk to participants in mental health research. Participation can also increase the risks of psychosocial harms, such as being identified by one's family or community as having a particular condition. Such breaches of confidentiality need not involve gross negligence on the part of researchers. The mere fact that someone regularly attends a clinic or sees a psychiatrist could be sufficient to suggest that they have a mental illness. In other research, the design makes confidentiality hard to maintain. For example, the genetic research described by Rodriguez involved soliciting the enrollment of the family members of people with antisocial personality disorder.

The harm from a breach of confidentiality is exacerbated when the condition studied or the study population is stigmatized. Both of these were true in the case Sana Loue describes in this collection. She studied the co-occurrence of severe mental illnesses and human immunodeficiency virus risk in African-American men who have sex with men. Not only was there shame attached to the conditions under study, such that they were euphemistically described in the advertisements for the research, but also many of the participants were men who had heterosexual public identities.

Informed Consent

Many people with mental disorders retain the capacity (ability) and competence (legal status) to give informed consent. Conversely, potential participants without mental problems may lack or lose capacity (and competence). Nevertheless, problems with the ability to consent remain particularly pressing with regard to mental health research. This is partly a consequence of psychological conditions that reduce or remove the ability to give informed consent. To study these conditions, it may be necessary to use participants who have them, which means that alternative participants who can consent are, in principle, not available. This occurred in the study of South African stroke patients described by Anne Pope in this collection. The researcher she describes wanted to compare the effectiveness of exercises designed to help patients whose ability to communicate was compromised by their stroke. Given their communication difficulties and the underlying condition, there would inevitably be questions about their capacity. Whether it is permissible to enroll people who cannot give informed consent into a study depends on several factors, including the availability of alternative study populations, the levels of risk involved, and the possible benefits to participants in comparison with alternative health care they could receive.

In research that expects to enroll people with questionable capacity to consent, it is wise to institute procedures for assessing the capacity of prospective participants. There are two general strategies for making these assessments. The first is to conduct tests that measure the general cognitive abilities of the person being assessed, as an IQ test does. If she has the ability to perform these sorts of mental operations sufficiently well, it is assumed that she also has the ability to make autonomous decisions about research participation. A Mini-Mental State Examination might be used to make this sort of assessment ( Kim and Caine, 2002 ). The second capacity assessment strategy focuses on a prospective participant's understanding and reasoning with regard to the specific research project they are deciding about. If she understands that project and what it implies for her and is capable of articulating her reasoning about it, then it is clear that she is capable of consenting to participation, independent of her more general capacities. This sort of assessment requires questions that are tailored to each specific research project and cannot be properly carried out unless the assessor is familiar with that research.

Where someone lacks the capacity to give consent, sometimes a proxy decision maker can agree to trial participation on her behalf. In general, proxy consent is not equivalent to individual consent: unless the proxy was expressly designated to make research decisions by the patient while capacitated, the proxy lacks the power to exercise the patient's rights. As a result, the enrollment of people who lack capacity is only acceptable when the research poses a low net risk to participants or holds out the prospect of benefiting them. When someone has not designated a proxy decision maker for research, it is common to allow the person who has the power to make decisions about her medical care also to make decisions about research participation. However, because medical care is directed at the benefit of the patient, but research generally is not aimed at the benefit of participants, the basis for this assumption is unclear. Its legal basis may be weak, too. For example, in her discussion of research on South African stroke patients, Pope notes the confusion surrounding the legality of surrogate decision makers, given that the South African constitution forbids proxy decision making for adults (unless they have court-appointed curators), but local and international guidance documents seem to assume it.

Although it is natural to think of the capacity to give consent as an all-or-nothing phenomenon, it may be better conceptualized as domain-specific. Someone may be able to make decisions about some areas of her life, but not others. This fits with assumptions that many people make in everyday life. For example, a 10-year-old child may be deemed capable of deciding what clothes she will wear but may not be capable of deciding whether to visit the dentist. The capacity to consent may admit of degrees in another way, too. Someone may have diminished capacity to consent but still be able to make decisions about their lives if given the appropriate assistance. For example, a patient with mild dementia might not be capable of deciding on his own whether he should move in with a caregiver, but his memory lapses during decision making could be compensated for by having his son present to remind him of details relevant to the decision. The concept of supported decision making has been much discussed in the literature on disability; however, its application to consent to research has received little attention ( Herr, 2003 ; United Nations, 2007 ).

The ability to give valid informed consent is the aspect of autonomy that is most frequently discussed in the context of mental health research, but it is not the only important aspect. Several of the case studies in this collection also raise issues of voluntariness and coercion. For example, Douglas Wassenaar and Nicole Mamotte describe a study in which professors enrolled their students, which raises the question of the vulnerability of student subjects to pressure. Here, there is both the possibility of explicit coercion and the possibility that students will feel pressure even from well-meaning researchers. For various reasons, including dependence on caregivers or healthcare professionals and the stigma of their conditions, people with mental illnesses can be particularly vulnerable to coercion.

Post-Trial Obligations

The obligations of health researchers extend past the end of their study. Participants'data remain in the hands of researchers after their active involvement in a study is over, and patients with chronic conditions who enroll in clinical trials may leave them still in need of treatment.

Ongoing confidentiality is particularly important when studying stigmatized populations (such as men who have sex with men as discussed by Sana Loue) or people with stigmatizing conditions (such as bipolar disorder). In research on mental illnesses, as with many medical conditions, it is now commonplace for researchers to collect biological specimens and phenotypic data from participants to use in future research (such as genome-wide association studies). Additional challenges with regard to confidentiality are raised by the collection of data and biological specimens for future research because confidentiality must then be guaranteed in a long period of time and frequently with different research groups making use of the samples.

Biobanking also generates some distinctive ethical problems of its own. One concerns how consent to the future use of biological specimens should be obtained. Can participants simply give away their samples for use in whatever future research may be proposed, or do they need to have some idea of what this research might involve in order to give valid consent? A second problem, which arises particularly in transnational research, concerns who should control the ongoing use of the biobank. Many researchers think that biological samples should not leave the country in which they were collected, and developing country researchers worry that they will not be allowed to do research on the biobanks that end up in developed countries. This was another key concern with the proposed study in Latin America.

In international collaborative research, further questions arise as a result of the disparities between developing country participants and researchers and developed country sponsors and researchers. For example, when clinical trials test novel therapies, should successful therapies be made available after the trial? If they should, who is responsible for ensuring their provision, to whom should they be provided, and in what does providing them consist? In the case of chronic mental illnesses like depression or bipolar disorder, patient-participants may need maintenance treatment for the rest of their lives and may be at risk if treatment is stopped. This suggests that the question of what happens to them after the trial must at least be considered by those who sponsor and conduct the trial and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Exactly on whom obligations fall remains a matter of debate ( Millum, 2011 ).

Ethics Guidelines

A number of important policy documents are relevant to the ethics of research into mental disorders. The WMA's Declaration of Helsinki and the CIOMS' Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research both consider research on individuals whose capacity and/or competence to consent is impaired. They agree on three conditions: a) research on these people is justified only if it cannot be carried out on individuals who can give adequate informed consent, b) consent to such research should be obtained from a proxy representative, and c) the goal of such research should be the promotion of the health of the population that the research participants represent ( Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, 2002 ; World Medical Association, 2008 ). In addition, with regard to individuals who are incapable of giving consent, Guideline 9 of CIOMS states that interventions that do not “hold out the prospect of direct benefit for the individual subject” should generally involve no more risk than their “routine medical or psychological examination.”

In 1998, the US National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) published a report entitled Research Involving Persons with Mental Disorders That May Affect Decision-making Capacity ( National Bioethics Advisory Commission, 1998 ). As the title suggests, this report concentrates on issues related to the capacity or competence of research participants to give informed consent. Its recommendations are largely consistent with those made in the Declaration of Helsinki and CIOMS, although it is able to devote much more space to detailed policy questions (at least in the United States context). Two domains of more specific guidance are of particular interest. First, the NBAC report considers the conditions under which individuals who lack the capacity to consent may be enrolled in research posing different levels of risk and supplying different levels of expected benefits to participants. Second, it provides some analysis of who should be recognized as an appropriate proxy decision maker (or “legally authorized representative”) for participation in clinical trials.

Finally, the World Psychiatric Association's Madrid Declaration gives guidelines on the ethics of psychiatric practice. This declaration may have implications for what is permissible in psychiatric research, insofar as the duties of psychiatrists as personal physicians are also duties of psychiatrists as medical researchers. It also briefly considers the ethics of psychiatric research, although it notes only the special vulnerability of psychiatric patients as a concern distinctive of mental health research ( World Psychiatric Association, 2002 ).

The opinions expressed are the author's own. They do not reflect any position or policy of the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Public Health Service, or Department of Health and Human Services.

Disclosure : The author declares no conflict of interest.

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Writing ethics case studies for upsc mains gs paper 4.

Table of contents

"Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do." 

– Potter Stewart

When it comes to UPSC's GS Paper 4, this distinction becomes pivotal. How would you handle a tricky ethical dilemma in a high-stakes situation? 

The UPSC's GS Paper 4 is all about navigating these grey areas, where the 'right' answer isn't always clear-cut, where you have to make tough calls, and justifying your choices. Yes, we’re talking about clarity, logic, and a sprinkle of empathy. 

So, knowing how to write a case study for UPSC can make a big difference in your performance. Let’s go step by step, from understanding the problem to crafting a solution that would make even your toughest examiner nod in approval!

Understanding the Structure of UPSC GS Paper IV

Understanding the structure of GS Paper IV is key to success in UPSC Mains. This paper, focused on ethics, integrity, and aptitude, has twelve compulsory questions, which are crucial for learning how to write a case study for UPSC.

Question Format and Marks:

• Number of Questions: There are twelve questions divided into two sections.
• Mark Distribution: Questions are worth either 10 or 20 marks. For 10-mark questions, write within 150 words. For 20-mark questions, aim for 250 words.
• Total Marks: The paper totals 250 marks.

Types of Questions:

• Conceptual Questions: These test your understanding of ethical issues, integrity, and aptitude, making up 125 marks.
• Case Studies: These test your ability to apply ethical concepts to real-life scenarios, also worth 125 marks.

Knowing this structure helps you prepare effectively for both the theoretical and practical parts of the exam.

Now that we've grasped the framework, let's dive into one of the most intriguing sections: the case studies.

Introduction to GS Paper IV  - Case Studies for UPSC

UPSC Mains GS Paper 4 is all about testing your ethical compass. Case studies are the real deal here. They’re not just academic exercises; they’re a peek into how you’d handle the pressure of real-life administrative challenges.

Let’s take a look at the essence of this paper:

• Ethics and Human Interface: This is about understanding what's right and wrong, how it affects people, and the tricky balance between personal and professional life.
• Attitude : Your mindset matters. This part checks if you're the right fit for public service.
• Aptitude and Values : This section checks if you're good at solving problems, making fair calls, and sticking to what’s right.

Why is this paper important?

• Real-life practice : You learn to use what you've studied in real situations.
• Problem-solving skills: Facing tough choices makes you a better problem solver.
• Effective Administration: Understanding ethics makes you a fairer and more effective administrator.

So, we can establish that case studies are the heart of this paper. But what is the UPSC trying to unveil here? 

Well, the case studies for UPSC are used to assess whether you can:

• Figure out what's the right thing to do.
• Manage people and resources wisely.
• Make tough choices fairly.

Great, now that we've nailed down what the UPSC is looking for, let's break down how to actually ace and master how to write a case study for UPSC.

Crafting Your UPSC Case Study Response

When you’re figuring out how to write a case study for UPSC, a clear framework makes all the difference. This approach helps you address every important part of the case systematically. 

Here’s a breakdown of the key elements to include in your answers when writing case studies for UPSC:

Understanding the Core Issue

The first step to writing a great case study answer is figuring out what the question is really about. Don't get lost in the details.

• Capture the Essence: Start by briefly summarizing the main problem. This keeps you focused on what’s most important.
• Describe Clearly: Break down the core dilemma in simple terms. Make sure you highlight the main conflict or ethical challenge.
• Example: Think about a situation like development versus the environment. This example shows how to weigh competing interests effectively.

Identifying Stakeholders

Once you've nailed down the core issue, it's time to identify who's involved. 

• List Affected Parties: Everyone affected by the situation is a stakeholder. This could be anyone from employees and government officials to local communities and even the environment itself.

For instance, in a dam project, stakeholders could include the local population, farmers, environmental activists, the construction company, the government, and even people living downstream.

• Analyze Their Interests: Understand what each stakeholder wants. What are their interests, concerns, and potential gains or losses? This analysis helps you see the situation from different angles and anticipate potential conflicts.

Ethical Issues and Dilemmas

When you’re figuring out how to write a case study for UPSC, start by spotting the ethical issues. This helps you get to the heart of the problem and make balanced choices. Here’s how to do it:

• Identify the ethical dilemmas: These are situations where your values clash, like choosing between personal benefits and the greater good. Recognizing these conflicts is key to addressing the core issues.
• Describe these dilemmas with clear examples: For instance, in a whistleblowing case, you might face a choice between 'Personal Loss vs. Public Interest' or 'Organizational Loyalty vs. Public Interest.' Using specific examples will show how you handle these tough choices.

Brainstorming Your Options

Once you've pinpointed the problem and the ethical dilemmas, it's time to think about your options. List out 3-4 possible actions and weigh their pros and cons.

For example, if you're dealing with a corruption case in a government department, your options might be:

• Report the matter to higher authorities: This is the most straightforward approach, but it might lead to retaliation or a cover-up.
• Gather evidence discreetly and approach an anti-corruption agency: This could be more effective, but it requires careful planning and could be risky.
• Confront the corrupt official directly: This might resolve the issue quickly, but it could also escalate the situation.
• Ignore the issue: While tempting, this is clearly unethical and could have long-term consequences.

Deciding the Course of Action

Now comes the vital part: choosing the best course of action. Pick the option that strikes the best balance between ethics and practicality, which is important for learning how to write a case study for UPSC.

• Pick the Best Option: Choose the most balanced and ethical choice that works in real life.
• Explain Your Decision: Use quotes and examples to back up why you chose this option. Show you’ve thought it through.
• Keep It Practical and Legal: Make sure your choice is practical and follows current rules.

Articulation and Detailing in Your Response

When it comes to case studies in UPSC, it’s super important to explain your plan clearly. Don't just say what you'll do; show how you'll do it. Be simple and easy to understand.

• Outline Your Steps: Clearly describe each step you’ll take in your chosen course of action. This helps make your plan easy to follow and understand.
• Use First-Person Perspective: Write from your own point of view. This makes your response more personal and shows your thought process.
• Include Quotes and Terms: Use relevant quotes and key terms to back up your arguments. This adds credibility and shows you know your stuff.

Remember, the goal is to convince the examiners that your plan is practical, effective, and ethically sound.

Also watch: Perfect Strategy for Mains Answer Writing | A Complete Guide | SuperKalam  

Time Management and Practice

When figuring out how to write a case study for UPSC, time management is crucial. Here’s a simple approach:

• Set a Time Limit: Dedicate around 90 minutes for case studies during your practice sessions . This helps you get used to the exam's time limits.
• Practice Regularly: Keep writing case studies using past papers and mock tests. It’s a great way to get familiar with the format and improve your skills.

Also worth reading: How To Begin Daily Writing Practice For UPSC Mains Answers  

• Review and Get Feedback: After practicing, review your answers and ask for feedback. This helps you identify what needs improvement and refine your technique.

Need fast, expert feedback on your answers?  

SuperKalam’s 1-minute Mains Answer Evaluation has you covered. 

Share your handwritten answers, get detailed feedback and a model answer quickly.

Ready to see how all these steps come together in a real case study example? Let’s break it down.

Mastering Case Studies for UPSC: A Practical Example

Q. What does each of the following quotations mean to you?

(a) “Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is right to do. “- Potter Stewart

(b) “If a country is to be corruption-free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel that there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are father, mother and teacher.”- APJ Abdul Kalam

GS Paper 4 (2022)

Analyzing the Quotation

a) “Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is right to do.” - Potter Stewart

• Meaning: Know the difference between what’s legal and what’s moral. It’s not enough to just follow the law; you must do what’s right. 
• Application: Use this in case studies to highlight that the ethical choice can differ from the legal one. Discuss situations where doing the right thing exceeds legal requirements.

(b) “If a country is to be corruption-free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel that there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are father, mother, and teacher.” - APJ Abdul Kalam

• Meaning: Parents and teachers are crucial in shaping ethical behavior, building a corruption-free society through strong moral values. 
• Application: In case studies, consider how upbringing and education influence decisions. Show how early moral guidance impacts responses to ethical challenges.

Example of Case Study Analysis

Let's apply these quotes to a case study:

Case Study: You discover corruption in your department. You have to decide between reporting it, which could risk your career, or staying silent to protect yourself.

Step-by-Step Approach:

1. Understanding the Core Issue: The dilemma is reporting corruption vs. personal career safety.

2. Identifying Stakeholders: List everyone involved – you, your family, colleagues, the public, and government integrity.

3. Ethical Issues and Dilemmas:

• Personal Loss vs. Public Interest: Reporting might hurt your career but benefits the public by ensuring ethical governance.
• Organizational Loyalty vs. Public Interest: Staying silent protects colleagues but harms public trust.

4. Brainstorming Options:

• Report the corruption to higher authorities.
• Gather evidence discreetly and go to an anti-corruption agency.
• Confront the corrupt officials directly.
• Ignore the issue.

5. Deciding the Course of Action:

• Chosen Option: Report to an anti-corruption agency.
• Rationale: This meets the ethical duty to serve the public interest, despite personal risk. It follows the values from both Potter Stewart and APJ Abdul Kalam – doing what’s morally right and fighting corruption.

6. Articulation and Detailing:

• Outline steps : Collect evidence, seek legal advice, report to the agency, and ensure personal safety.
• Use first-person perspective: "I would collect evidence, seek legal advice, and report to ensure my safety and solidify the case."
• Include relevant quotes : "As Potter Stewart said, ‘Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is right to do.’”

Also read: Strategy for Evaluating Your Own UPSC Mains Answers Daily  

With our approach in mind, let’s wrap up with some essential readings that can help you nail how to write a case study for UPSC.

Essential Books for UPSC GS Paper 4 Case Studies

So, you've got the framework, now let's talk books! Good books can be your best friends when tackling case studies for UPSC. They offer insights, examples, and different perspectives.

Here are some of the top picks to get you started:

Looking for a game-changing study resource?

Join 25,000+ aspirants on SuperKalam’s Telegram channel ! 

Access handwritten notes, mind-maps, and daily practice targets to boost your preparation for how to write a case study for UPSC!

Let's wrap things up with a quick conclusion.

So there you have it! The key to acing UPSC case studies is all about action. Don't just theorize. Show the examiners how you'd tackle real-world problems with practical, ethical solutions.

Remember, strong ethical decision-making is the foundation for a successful career in public service. By knowing how to write a case study for UPSC, you'll demonstrate your potential to be a fair, effective, and ethical leader.

So, are you ready to write winning case study responses? SuperKalam is your personal mentor, providing expert guidance and resources to help you excel in every aspect of the exam!

Let us help you reach your UPSC goals!

You might also like: Tips to Clear UPSC Exam in First Attempt  

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Chapter 3: Strategic Communication Ethics

11 Ethics case study

The issue of ethics is important in the strategic communication profession. Creators of content should heavily rely on a code of ethics when carrying out various tasks. Using ethical reasoning, whether you’re designing a campaign or writing a newspaper article, demonstrates basic understanding of the influence of messages on audiences. Ethical communication also helps an organization avoid dilemmas and compromising situations.

Several cases covered in the press highlight the ramifications of failure to use ethical and honest standards in communication efforts. The case study below demonstrates this.

Case study: Ryan Holiday, media manipulation, and the rise of the Tucker Max brand

Media strategist Ryan Holiday made a career of controlling the media to achieve public relations goals. A few years ago, he became a PR specialist for Tucker Max, a controversial blogger and author who garnered attention for his lewd writing and explicit discussions of his sexual adventures with countless women. Holiday played an essential role in a campaign for Max’s book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Pretending to be someone who hated Max’s writings, Holiday contacted influencers, bloggers, and television stations about the social controversy caused by the brand. Soon Max’s book received widespread attention from national media outlets and writers all over the blogosphere (Ariely & Melamede, 2015).

Filmmakers later created a movie based on the book. Holiday used some of the same tactics to promote the film. He emailed college organizations across the country, again pretending to be someone who was disgusted with the Tucker Max brand. He included photos of fake advertisements that were offensive to women (which Holiday himself had created), and said that the advertisements were used to promote the film (Ariely & Melamede, 2015). He told campus leaders, bloggers, and other influencers to urge people not to see the film.

Holiday was intentionally trying to create protests to generate media coverage and public awareness about the film and the Tucker Max brand in general (Ariely & Melamede, 2015). He used deceptive measures and some aspects of controversy—strong opinions on a topic, social backlash, and a hated public figure—as leverage. And he was very successful: organized groups across the country held protests against the film, furthering the widespread attention on Tucker Max. In this situation, the saying “any press is good press” worked to his advantage.

Cases such as this raise several concerns related to the field of strategic communication. Most important, the Tucker Max situation calls into question the ethics Holiday used to control the media. How far should one go to promote an organization or brand? The perception exists that strategic communication professionals, specifically those in public relations, are expert spin doctors and media manipulators; because of this, the profession’s credibility has been damaged. In order to reclaim the trustworthiness of the field, strategic communication professionals must abide by strong ethics in their decision-making processes.

The majority of strategic communication professionals promote their client or organization in an honest and straightforward manner. One case study that demonstrates this comes from a Columbus-based public relations agency, Geben Communication. In 2014, the agency helped promote a small catering business, Two Caterers. It used a targeted media relations strategy and pitched to several local publications and news stations (Geben Communication, 2016) in order to enhance brand awareness. The pitches contained factual information, and those working on the account did not use manipulative tactics to achieve their goal.

Geben Communication’s promotional effort had positive results. Local publications wrote several articles on Two Caterers, and a television station invited the small business to do a cooking demonstration for a morning segment. Furthermore, Two Caterers received accolades and recognition from small business associations and magazines.

Writing for Strategic Communication Industries Copyright © 2016 by Jasmine Roberts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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[Ethics] Sample Questions, Case studies for UPSC General studies paper 4 based on Donald Menzel’s book

Essay-ish / abstract questions, disobeying an informal order, returning unspent money, misleading for good purpose, private matter of public employee, political neutrality, political neutrality part.2, salary hike vs team spirit, holding charity auctions in the office, spouse in the same office, private endorsement by public official, man of word or man of money, courage with a price tag.

So far in the [Ethics] mock-question series

• UPSC’s sample paper for GS4
• Samples questions based on ethics courses of San Diego and Texas University

Now this this articles contains case-studies/questions are based on Donald C. Menzel’s book Ethics Moments in Government:Cases and Controversies .

• For the Essay-ish questions I’ve merely lifted statements from the book. Because UPSC seems to be doing similar thing for Public Administration (lift sentences from some book and ask the candidate to ‘comment’ on it).
• for the case-studies questions, I’ve given Indian flavor to those American cases and included a few answer key points but by no means they’re sacred/official/final/marksworthy- they’re only meant to serve as lighthouse for the utterly confused.

Answer following questions 12 marks/120 words each:

• What do you understand by ethics audit? How is it different from financial audit?
• Are ethics practices and behaviors in the business world different than those found in public service? If so, why?
• Describe an ethical issue you have had to address in your school or college life and the way you handled it. If confronted with the same issue today, would you handle it in the same way?
• Are ethical standards in business organizations higher or lower than those in public service organizations?
• Is there more unethical behavior in government than in business?
• Do you believe the ethical performance of an employee can be evaluated fairly and accurately? Yes/No/Why?
• Is a professional code of ethics that is not enforceable a satisfactory code? Yes/No/Why?
• How does corrupt behavior resemble or differ from unethical behavior?
• Should we hold appointed officials, such as collectors and tehsildaars, to a higher standard of behavior than elected officials such as municipal councilors? Yes/No/Why?
• Gandhi always advocated the purity of means- with respect to that, do you think it is unethical for a military officer to mislead the enemy? Yes/No/Why?

Comment on following statements (12 marks/120 words each)

• Ethics are less a goal than a pathway, less a destination than a trip, less an inoculation than a process.
• Righteous disobedience is better than Moral muteness.
• Exemplary leadership is critical to encouraging ethical behavior in government organizations.
• Openness and transparency are critical safeguards that keep our democracy alive and well.
• Ethical codes are merely veneers. Shiny on the outside but hollow on the inside.
• Living up to the public trust is much more than just an act of compliance.
• Ethics is the cornerstone of effective, efficient, democratic governance.
• Ethics may be only instrumental, it may be only a means to an end, but it is a necessary means to an end.
• The relationships between ethics, service, and trust are mutually reinforcing.
• Ignorance is not an excuse for misconduct.
• Those who commit misconduct out of ignorance should be treated less harshly.
• If men were angels, no government would be necessary
• Humans roam the earth, not the heavens, so ethics are indispensable.
• Honesty and truthfulness have to be practiced and balanced with delicate diplomacy on some occasions.
• List the reforms necessary to encourage ethical behavior and prevent misconduct in public organizations of India.

Ethics Case Studies / Role playing Questions

DevAnand is working as a clerk in Collector’s office. Due to staff shortage, Dev also performs the task of raising flag over the office building every morning and taking it down every evening, although it is not part of his official job description.

One day a criminal turned politician Madan Puri dies. Years ago, Devanand’s best friend was murdered during a riot allegedly orchestrated by Madan Puri.

Nonetheless, State secretariat passes an order to all District collectors, to keep National flag at “half-mast” over their offices, to mourn the death of the Mr.Madan Puri.

DevAnand sees this news on TV, gets angry with such mockery of our national flag. He decides not to goto office next morning and keeps the door key of rooftop with himself. He is confident, “ no formal punishment can be given to me, because this was not part of my official duty. At most Collector sahib will reprimand me informally but I don’t care because Madan Puri killed my best friend. ”

Do you think DevAnand has made the right decision? Yes/No/Why?

Answer keypoints

DevAnand made a wrong decision because:

• It prevents other staff members from carrying out the ‘official’ order from StateHQ.
• It puts his boss in an embarrassing position in front of the StateHQ.
• If Dev’s conscience doesn’t permit him carrying out a task, he should inform his boss. But running away with keys, without informing anyone = irresponsible.
• Such behavior is not expected from a good team player / a public servant.

DevAnand is running an NGO to help street children. He receives government grant of Rs.2 lakh rupees for a project to teach the “out of school” children, who work at tea-stalls, do boot-polishing etc. A year passes, but Dev managed to utilize only 50,000 rupees from the grant. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t convince many poor children or their families to join his NGO’s program.

As per the grant rules, Dev has to return all the unspent money back to government by the end of March 31 st . But his colleague Pran suggests following:

• If we honestly return Rs.1.5 lakh back, then government officials will think we are amateur, ineffective NGOs and they’ll substantially reduce our grant for next year or even worse- they’ll not give us any project next time!
• We should take help of CA Prem Chopra to manipulate our account books and show majority of the grant was utilized for education.
• Many other NGOs do the same thing- there is no problem – nobody will raise any objection, as long as we give 20% of the grant to SDM in charge of this project.
• Although it sounds unethical but we won’t use this money for personal needs, we’ll use it on street children only. Hence our act is fully ethical and moral.

What should DevAnand do with the money?

Answer keypoints:

• “Because others are also doing it” – is never the valid justification to commit an unethical or criminal act.
• Manipulating account books to keep the grant money.
• Bribing SDM to keep the grant money.
• The shelf life of lie and deception is very low- especially when manipulating the account books – ask Ramalinga Raju, ex-chief of Satyam.
• DevAnand was unable to use 75% of the grant money, it implies
• Dev didn’t try hard enough OR
• Government had exaggerated the amount of money required to educate the out of school children OR

In anycase, If Dev keeps the unspent grant, government will continue pumping more money- other NGOs and the SDM will keep amassing wealth. Therefore, DevAnand should return the unspent grant back to the government.

DevAnand is the inspector in charge of Rampur Police station. The police station building is in dire need of repairs, but hasn’t received any grants for years. One day, a cyclone hits a nearby area, damaging most of the houses and shops. Although Dev’s police station gets partially damaged, but most of the building remain intact . Government sends a disaster assessment team to ascertain the level of damage and pay relief money. The DSP Mr. Pran, orders DevAnand to do following:

• Hire some laborers and destroy the remaining parts of your police station building.
• When disaster assessment team comes, you tell them building collapsed by the cyclone, and ask them to give priority in funding after all police station is one the most important public offices in a town.

Should DevAnand obey his boss’s order?

Answer keypoints The shelf life of lie and deception is very low. Especially when many people are involved. In this case: laborers and any bystanders. Both Dev and Pran are risking themselves to an unnecessary negative publicity and possible departmental inquiry and punishment for professional misconduct. Indeed police building needed repairs and should have been given a grant months ago, but three wrongs don’t make a right:

• Wanton destruction of a public building.
• Misleading the disaster assessment team.
• Police officer DevAnand spending his time and energy in such activity rather than doing rescue-relief-patrolling duty after the disaster.

DevAnand is working as an under Secretary in the pension department. One day, his friend GuruDutt, an SBI PO, narrates following incident:

• For last two years, a retired Government employee Mr.Ashok Kumar is giving away 30% of his monthly pension to Mrs.Bindu Chopra every month through cheque.
• I found Mrs.Bindu Chopra happens to be the wife of Mr.Prem Chopra, a section officer in the pension office under you (DevAnand.)
• I feel something is fishy- may be this is part of a large bribe scam where senior citizens are forced to pay money to clear their pension files from Prem Chopra, and have to submit bribes in his wife’s account.

DevAnand visits Mr.Ashok Kumar’s house but he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, unable to give coherent answers. Frustrated DevAnand directly confronts Prem Chopra. But Prem says “Mr.Ashok Kumar was a friend of my father. He has no relatives or children and my wife Bindu has been taking care of him like daughter since a long time. Therefore, Mr.Ashok Kumar gives us money out of good will, so we can send our son to an expensive IIT coaching class @Kota, Rajasthan. Besides this is a personal family matter and none of your damn business.”

Do you think DevAnand made a blunder or was he merely performing an ethical duty?

Here, both GuruDutt and DevAnand has failed to act in responsible manner. Because:

• A banker must keep his clients’ data confidential, unless required by the law to disclose it.
• GuruDutt didn’t even wait to cross verify who else is giving money to Mrs.Bindu Chopra’s account. Because if there was a ‘large scale bribe scam’ then lot other senior citizens would be making payment to Bindu’s account, and not just Mr.Ashok Kumar alone.
• Even in that situation, Gurudutt had to consult his boss within his own bank first. He cannot go around giving informal tips to outsiders. This is an unethical act for a banker.
• DevAnand too acted in hasty manner. First, he starts ‘investigation’ based on an informal tip from a banker who is not supposed to tip him in the first place. He should have consulted the vigilance department before moving further.
• Second, Dev Anand confronts Prem Chopra, without any hardcore evidence. When you’re holding a public office, you can’t go around accusing people in such haste. It breaks the office discipline, destroys the staff morale and allows the guilty person to cover his tracks.

Prem Chopra, a civil society activist, has launched a mass-movement to change Prime-ministerial form of government to presidential form of government. Dev Anand is an undersecretary in the PMO. Before joining civil service, he had done Ph.D on the demerits of presidential form of government. He is invited by a news channel for prime-time debate. The newschannel anchor, Mr.Arnab Goswami assures DevAnand following:

• It’ll be only an educational-intellectual debate among scholars.
• No politicians from ruling or opposition party are invited in our show.
• You’re invited in your capacity as a scholar in political science and not as a bureaucrat.

Should DevAnand accept Arnab Goswami’s invitation for news-debate?

Answerkey point:

No. Because bureaucrats should not voice their opinion about political matters on public platform. Even if no politician is invited, some other scholar/participant/anchor might raise points in favour or against the ruling party during the debate, and Dev will find himself in a political minefield.

To curtail the mounting fiscal deficit, Finance Minister Pran Chindu decides to merge agriculture ministry with forest ministry; coal ministry with oil ministry and reduce personnel in the central services by 30%. But opposition party is hardly raising any objection –they are occupied with onion price rise issue. Media is too busy covering MS Dhoni’s new hairstyle.

DevAnand, an employee in the Cabinet secretariat feels both Opposition party and media have failed to perform their ethical duty to inform citizens about matters of public interest. Therefore, he starts writing anonymous blogs and tweets to inform public about the negative consequences of Chindu’s austerity measures. Is DevAnand doing the right thing?

Answer key points:

• No. DevAnand is not doing the right thing.
• Role of public servant is to obey the will of the community- articulated through the elected members including the said Finance Minister.
• Public servant has to remain politically neutral. Dev is crossing that Laxman-Rekha by his anonymous blogs.

DevAnand has been serving as the Chief fire officer in city for over 3 years. Because of his efficient management, there were very few fire incidents, no lives were lost and property damage was minimum. He enjoys almost a celebrity like status in local media and city dwellers. As the election year comes, Mayor Pran, with an aim to garner goodwill among voters, frames a budget with 10% pay raise to fire bridge staff and 25% pay raise for the Chief fire Officer. Should DevAnand accept it or not/Why?

• Firefighting is a team work. Team leader must display fairness and equity.
• If Dev accepts 25% raise, it could promote his image as an aloof, insensitive, self-serving boss. Staff may not follow his lead with same enthusiasm afterwards.
• Therefore, Dev should not accept more than what is being offered to other employees of Fire brigade. (10%).

Pran, the bank employee, approaches Bank Manager DevAnand and says following:

• My child is suffering from blood cancer. I don’t have health insurance policy and my salary is insufficient to meet these medical expenses.
• But over the years, I’ve been collecting autographed bats and balls of various cricketers.
• I seek your permission to hold a charity auction in the office. I’ll also send fliers to clients of our bank. Everyone is welcome to bid for these bats and balls, so I can raise money for the medical treatment of my child.

Three other bank employees-Prem Chopra, Madan Puri and Ranjith overhear this conversation. They also inform DevAnand – indeed Pran’s financial situation is very bad and his child will die if the treatment is not done on time, therefore permission should be given to hold this charity auction.

Should Dev give permission or not?

• No. Because some members may informally feel pressured to give money -Especially Pran’s juniors and subordinates.
• It might create a feeling of alienation between employees who bid and those who don’t.
• Next time another employee will try to do the same, may be with a trivial reason e.g. I’m willing to auction t-shirts autographed by filmstars to repay the last EMI of my home loan, allow me to hold auction in the office. And if Dev says no that time, it might create an impression Dev is biased towards certain employees- staff morale goes down.
• Therefore, it is best to keep auctions and other money raising activities out of the workplace irrespective of their noble aims.

DCP DevAnand marries Sub inspector Rosie. In the office, Rosie doesn’t directly report to DevAnad but Dev has responsibility for signing off on her annual evaluation. Although Dev doesn’t give any preferential treatment to Rosie but one of her colleague, Prem Chopra, complained several times to the DIG Pran: “Dev saab always gives highest ratings to his wife and I’m always given average ratings despite my best performance in criminal investigations.“

DIG conducts inquiry, doesn’t find anything against DevAnand. Later Dev officially reprimands Prem Chopra for this unprofessional behavior.

Frustrated Prem Chopra narrates this incident to his wife Bindu. Bindu decides to take matters in her own hands, writes an anonymous email to the local press, informing how Rosie hasn’t legally divorced her first husband Marco, yet she is staying with DCP DevAnand and gives vivid details of their “adulterous” live-in relationship.

Rita reporter, an expert on such masala news, starts giving ball by ball commentary in her newspaper about Rosie’s past by interviewing her college friends, neighbors, relatives etc. Everybody in the town starts gossiping about this. Dev asks his IT expert friend GuruDutt to investigate. GuruDutt digs out that email originated from Prem Chopra’s home computer.What should DevAnand do:  Reprimand Prem Chopra once more?  Suspend him for indiscipline? Sue him for defamation? Is doing nothing an option?

• Doing nothing is not a viable option since situations like this only fester and become more problematic.
• It is never a good practice for a public official to have a relative in a subordinate position. Despite efforts to avoid perceived acts of favoritism, sooner or later the official will find himself being accused of an inappropriate action. Therefore, Police and Military organizations often have anti-fraternization policies. (e.g. As per the US Air Force rules, one of the couple has to quit from the service.)
• This situation is all about the perception of favoritism. The perception may or may not be true whether DevAnand is giving preferential treatment to Rosie during annual performance evaluation.
• To prevent this from happening, DevAnand needs to stop chasing Prem Chopra and take steps to get his wife posted in another office, or seek his own transfer to another office.
• Last but not least, the DevAnand should put to rest the question of the legality of his marriage to avoid future accusations.

Prem Chopra runs a company that offers private security guards, CCTV, burglary alarm and other security devices.

DCP DevAnand learns that everytime after a theft or robbery takes place, Police Inspector Pran advices the victim and bystanders to install security devices from Prem Chopra’s company to make their home and shops secure from criminals. Pran even tells them “ When you goto Prem Chopra’s office, tell him I’ve sent you, he’ll give you special discount. ”

Dev confronts Pran about this matter. Pran justifies his action by saying:

• Yes, I take money for Prem Chopra to endorse his security products for homes and offices.
• I use this money to pay my informers and keep a check on criminal elements. I don’t spent this money on myself or my family.
•  Even municipal buses and railway-wagons have advertisements, then why is an endorsement by a city official unethical or illegal?
• Besides, Prem Chopra’s security devices are very effective at preventing burglary.

Should DevAnand permit Pran to continue this endorsement activity? Yes/No/Why?

• Advertisement on bus / railway wagon is not same as a public official promoting a brand. Because those bus/railway ads don’t interfere with vehicle’s primary function of transporting persons from one place to another. But when a public official promotes a brand, he is spending part of his office time and energy for private gain rather than serving the citizen.
• If Dev permits Pran, then other staff members will also start similar marketing. Thus part of the office-time will diverted to selling products rather than solving crime
• Might even lead to internal rivalries about who is earning more commissions.
• Citizens may feel informal pressure to buy such products fearing their file / matter will not be cleared by the public officials otherwise.
• Endorsements of commercial products by public officials can easily result in an unethical situation: sharing financial gain through bribes, kickbacks, or postemployment opportunities for government officials.

In short, it will open a Pandora’s box. Therefore, DevAnand should order Pran to stop this activity at once.

DevAnand is a brilliant maths teacher in a private English medium school in Ahmedabad and gets yearly package of Rs.3 lakhs. Another school at Baroda offers him package of Rs. 3.5 lakhs. Dev makes a verbal commitment to the Baroda school principle, “Sure,I’ll join your school from next month.“

But when Dev submits his resignation to A’bad school, its Principle Mr.Pran requests him to stay and offers new package of Rs.3.8 lakhs. Should Dev take back his resignation? yes/no/why?

• from ethical perspective, even verbal acceptance = contract. And contract must be honored.
• Even if Pran’s counteroffer is higher, Dev has a moral obligation to remain consistent with his original intention (of joining Baroda school).

(Copy pasting a news report from TheHindu )

December 7, 2012, Chandigarh.

Robanjit Kaur, 23-year-old daughter of ASI Ravinderpal Singh was returning home after her IELTS coaching class when Shiromani Akali Dal leader Ranjit Singh Rana and his goons started teasing her. She called up her father Mr.Ravinderpal Singh, an ASI with Punjab Police.

When her father arrived and confronted the group, a heated argument followed and Rana pulled out his pistol and began firing at both father and daughter. Both received bullet injuries and father collapsed.

Even as Ms. Kaur struggled to shift her father into a vehicle to take him to hospital, Rana and his gang returned with a rifle and shot Ravinderpal Singh again in full public view.

Ms. Kaur said to media, “Rana kept kicking and hitting us in full public glare. I cried and pleaded for help but everyone ran away. Even when the ambulance came, I had to lift my father into it as no one came to help me.”

End of news.

A Sociologist remarks: “Our government has not set up a system to encourage civilians to fight against criminal acts. Why should someone risk injury or their life to save another if one’s life or livelihood is endangered? Government needs to enact a new scheme named after you know who , to reward any civilian with Rs.10 lakh, a government job and a 3 BHK flat, if he prevents a crime in a public place.”

Do you believe announcing big financial rewards to pedestrians who standup against a criminal, will change the situation? Does or can courage have a price tag? Yes/No/Why?

• Indeed an act of courage should be rewarded and applauded.
• But running a scheme with Rs.10 lakh and a government job, might lead to vigilante mobs of unemployed youth, roaming around with hokey sticks and baseball bats looking for a crime to happen (or orchestrating a crime by themselves) in order to get the money and the job.
• In the given case, goons were armed with pistols and rifles. No unarmed civilian can be expected to fight with them. In future, might lead to a situation where a poor man intentionally jumps in the fight, knowing fully well that he’ll be killed- but only doing so his family can get Rs.10 lakh.
• Maintenance of law and order is state’s responsibility not civilians’. Money is better spent on recruiting more policemen and judges.

For more on case studies & revision notes, visit Mrunal.org/ETHICS

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62 comments.

Thank u buddy

epic(awe)some ;) as always

Wonderful adaptation from ASPA Book Mrunal. Exemplary work.

@MRUNAL SIR PLEASE POST THE E-BOOK…

Thank you sir..

This is very good article on UPSC, thank you very much for providing such a nice article, for more about UPSC, please visit to http://upscmpscguide.blogspot.in

sir should we buy this book and from where,I mean what material should we read to answer your questions

anyone having this book pls share

thank you very much sir.you have done very good job.

really commendable job…thanx sir

Hi Mrunal, I have recently started following your Blog and I must say that you are doing a great job. Can you please suggest me some books or reading resources for preparing for “Ethics” section of the exam ? Can any of the other aspirants suggest something on this? Thanks.

Sir,cAn u suggest some boooks for this paper

Great job Mrunal…. This is my first site by first surfing on the internet for the ethics …so I appreciate u for data… So I am starting for ethics right now….

Please suggest a good book for GS Paper 4…Subbarao or Arihant…or any other.

Sir,please post important study materials for preparation of

UPSC(GS -4) mains paper on my Email.I need your help sir .please!!!

#Case Study : You have an opportunity for an internship in a respected business in the community. Part of your qualifications comes from a Senior Project that you worked on with several other students. Through the interview process, you discover that you are given credit for a key section of the project that really impressed the company. In fact, another member of your senior team, with little input from you, did that section. How do you proceed?

Firstly if you are aware that your senior has helped you out to get your work done then say the truth.

Mrunal sir ur site has been extremely beneficial fo my mains prep

Commendable perspective..

Lovely article – one of the best things I’ve recently read, and by far the most useful. I think it could also be useful for everyone to know how and where to fill a form online. Try PDFfiller to fill a form here http://goo.gl/W3yHeH . It allows you to to fill out PDF files.

Dear Mrunal Greetings from Nepal,

The Public Service Commission (PSC) of Nepal recently changed the syllabus of Joint Secretary. It includes one of the chapters “Ethics and Morality” has covered different topics which almost you are mentioned in your site. Here (Kathmandu) most of the aspirants of PSC competition exam (especially Joint Secretary competition ) has been suffering from the materials in this topics. Actually, I benefited…

Thank u very very much for ur great job….

Bal Sagar Giri Under Secretary Government of Nepal

Plz sir which books are study for ethics

Sir, Please provide a list of materials that are needed to ace the ethics paper.

Sir, Please update it to the next level. Thank you for the great work.

Sir Aap jo abhi case study newspaper analysis me dete ho uske model answer bhi diya kro

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ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

Using the Code

Case studies.

The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Practice (“the Code”) is meant to inform practice and education. It is useful as the conscience of the profession, but also for individual decision-making.

As prescribed by the Preamble of the Code, computing professionals should approach the dilemma with a holistic reading of the principles and evaluate the situation with thoughtful consideration to the circumstances. In all cases, the computing professional should defer to the public good as the paramount consideration. The analyses in the following cases highlight the intended interpretations of members of the 2018 Code task force, and should help guide computing professionals in how to apply the Code to various situations.

Case Study: Malware

Rogue Services touts its web hosting as “cheap, guaranteed uptime, no matter what.” While some of Rogue’s clients are independent web-based retailers, most are focused on malware and spam, which leverage Rogue for continuous delivery. Corrupted advertisements often link to code hosted on Rogue to exploit browser vulnerabilities to infect machines with ransomware. Rogue refuses to intervene with these services despite repeated requests.

Case Study: Medical Implants

Corazón is a medical technology startup that builds implantable heart health monitoring devices. After being approved by multiple countries’ medical device regulation agencies, Corazón quickly gained market share based on the ease of use of the app and the company’s vocal commitment to securing patients’ information. Corazón also worked with several charities to provide free or reduced access to patients living below the poverty line.

Case Study: Abusive Workplace Behavior

A new hire with the interactive technologies team, Diane became the target of team leader Max’s tirades when she committed a code update that introduced a timing glitch in a prototype shortly before a live demo. Diane approached the team’s manager, Jean, about Max’s abusive behavior. Jean agreed that the experience was unpleasant, but that was the price to pay for working in an intense, industry-leading team.

Case Study: Automated Active Response Weaponry

Q Industries is an international defense contractor specializing in autonomous vehicles. As an early pioneer in passive systems, such as bomb-defusing robots and crowd-monitoring drones, Q established itself as a vendor of choice for military and law enforcement applications. Q’s products have been deployed in a variety of settings, including conflict zones and nonviolent protests. Recently, however, Q has begun to experiment with automated active responses.

Case Study: Dark UX Patterns

The change request Stewart received was simple: replace the website’s rounded rectangle buttons with arrows, and adjust the color palette to one that mixes red and green text. But he found the prototype confusing. He suggested to his manager that this design would probably trick users into more expensive options they didn’t want. The response was that these were the changes requested by the client.

Case Study: Malicious Inputs to Content Filters

The U.S. Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) mandates that public schools and libraries employ mechanisms to block inappropriate matter on the grounds that it is deemed harmful to minors. Blocker Plus is an automated Internet content filter designed to help these institutions comply with CIPA’s requirements. During a review session, the development team reviewed a number of complaints about content being blocked inappropriately.

Guiding Members with a Framework of Ethical Conduct

Learn more about ACM’s commitment to ethical standards: the ACM Code of Ethics, Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice, and Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE), which is guiding these and other intiatives.

Ask an Ethicist

Ask an Ethicist invites ethics questions related to computing or technology. Have an interesting question, puzzle or conundrum? Submit yours via a form, and the ACM Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE) will answer a selection of them on the site.

Guidance in Addressing Real-World Ethical Challenges

The Integrity Project, created by ACM's Committee on Professional Ethics, is a series of resources designed to aid ethical decision making. It includes case studies demonstrating how the principles can be applied to specific ethical challenges, and an Ask an Ethicist advice column to help computing professionals navigate the sometimes challenging choices that can arise in the course of their work.

Supporting the Professionalism of ACM Members

The ACM Committee on Professional Ethics (COPE) is responsible for promoting ethical conduct among computing professionals by publicizing the Code of Ethics and by offering interpretations of the Code; planning and reviewing activities to educate membership in ethical decision making on issues of professional conduct; and reviewing and recommending updates to the Code of Ethics and its guidelines.

How to Answer GS 4 Ethics Paper in UPSC Mains

Note : This is a free chapter from my book, Fundamentals of Essay and Answer Writing. I have previously published two excerpts on  GS-2  and  Introductions to Essay . The book has similar detailed chapters on Essay and answer writing for GS-1,2,3,4, including the Anthropology optional. You can get the book here.

GS-IV can be confounding. That’s because the questions in this paper tend to be subjective with no single correct answer. There can be multiple ways to answer a particular question and all of them might be right. Hence, though aspirants are clear about the syllabus, they are often confused about how to answer ethics questions. Given this subjectivity and confusion pertaining to this paper, it becomes challenging to come up with a convincing framework for answer writing. However, some broad principles can guide us in structuring our responses.

In this chapter, we will go through some of those guidelines that can help you argue your case more clearly and make your ethics answer compelling.

GS- IV syllabus can be divided into two segments:

I. Theory II. Case Studies

In this portion (and to some extent in case studies) questions are usually of three types. One, the definition of an ethical value; two, the significance of the value; and three, the application of that value in our daily lives. To put it simply, theory questions ask you to explain a value along with examples.

Let’s take the term integrity. Three questions that could be asked about it are:

• What do you understand by integrity?  [Definition of the value]
• What is the importance of integrity? In its absence, what are the consequences for an individual, society, country or in different walks of life?  [Significance of the value]
• What are the challenges in cultivating integrity? How do you overcome them?  [Application of the value]You may substitute other ethical values for integrity to guess the kind of questions you may face in the test. Anticipate such questions and formulate a basic answer to all ethical terms given in the syllabus. This exercise will help you immensely in preparing for the theory portion.

Prepare a Definition for Each of the Terms in the Syllabus

If the question pertains to a specific ethical value, you must introduce the answer with a crisp definition, followed by an example. The definition can be a personal one, reflecting what it means to you.

Example 1: Integrity

Integrity means being honest and doing the right thing even when nobody is watching you. It can be conveyed through a simple example: Stopping at a red light signal at 3am in the night, even when the entire road was clear. This is an example of my integrity.

Example 2: Leadership

Leadership is the act of motivating a group of people towards achieving a common goal. Leadership provides inspiration, motivation and a vision for the future. Eg: Mahatma Gandhi showed exemplary leadership to unite the country in the fight for independence.

Always prefer a simple definition and avoid jargon. Simplicity is clarity. Another useful way of introducing your answers is by starting with an interesting quote and then proceeding to define the term.

Example 1: When you are answering a question on Emotional Intelligence, it can be started with the following quote:  “As much as 80% of adult success comes from EQ” – Daniel Goleman

Example 2: A question on RTI can be introduced with this quote:  “RTI is the master key to Good Governance” – 2nd ARC

Value mapping

In this exercise, you think of an eminent personality and then map him or her onto the values they stood for.

Below is a table with some examples of prominent leaders. You can add other values that you think match with a particular leader and repeat this exercise for all eminent persons.

As you map values onto the list of the most important leaders, philosophers, or administrators, it will become easier to recollect and quote relevant thinkers in your answers to give weight to your Ethical analysis.

Flow charts and Diagrams

For some topics such as Emotional Intelligence, Good Governance, and Civil Service Values, illustrating their features through flowcharts and diagrams makes your answers concise and neat. Prepare these flowcharts and diagrams beforehand and incorporate them in your mock tests so that it becomes easier to use them in the final test.

Make a database of real life examples

Examples are what make your answer come alive. They not only make the concept clearer, but also convey how the ethical principles and conflicts manifest in real life. Without them, an ethics answer would be a pointless theoretical rambling. Remember that the examiner is not evaluating how much you know about ethics. They want to see how well you can apply those principles in your day-to-day life. For this, examples are crucial.

Some important sources from which to collect these examples are:

• Newspapers — When you read the newspaper, look out for interesting incidents and news that can be used in your ethics paper. There are tons of examples that are reported everyday. For example, when you read about ‘Selfie with Daughter’ campaign, you must be able to correlate with ‘Social persuasion’ topic of the syllabus. Or, say, a newsarticle about civil servants working in remote districts of the country and how they are transforming them for the better. Even happenings in international affairs can be used as examples. Think of Cyber espionage, Syrian refugee crisis, Snowden controversy, Cambridge Analytica scandal and the moral issues pertaining to big tech companies like Facebook and Google. Such everyday examples are numerous, all you have to do is to link it with the syllabus and note them down for future reference.
• Personal Life (School, College, Family) : Littering on the street, jumping a traffic signal, cheating on a test, lying to your parents, shirking work at office. You can think of many examples from your everyday life to quote in your answers. Also, don’t restrict yourself to your own perspective. For instance, there might have been cases of extreme ragging in a certain college and the administration might have turned a blind eye to it in order to protect its image. You can discuss such ethical violations from other’s perspective which has come to your knowledge.
• Workplace : Every profession has its peculiar set of ethical dilemmas. So when you are brainstorming for examples, think of doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, civil servants etc and imagine the moral challenges they might come across in their respective professions. For instance, a lawyer defending a client who is guilty faces an ethical dilemma. An SDM who has to protect government lands and remove encroachments might, in the process, make some poor families homeless. Once you brainstorm, you will have a rich repository of such examples to cite from in your theory answers and case studies.
• From the Lives of Leaders, Philosophers, and Administrators:  Anecdotes, actions, stories, and quotes from the lives of eminent personalities can also be used as examples to drive your argument. Even mythology can be a rich resource to collect good examples. Lincoln’s fight against slavery is an example of moral courage. Dr. Kalam’s commitment to space and nuclear field is a testament to his professional competence.
• Crowdsourcing:  Many online portals such as Insights, IASBABA, ForumIAS, CivilsDaily run a daily module for answer writing practice. Sift through them and you will find some really good answers other people are writing. Reading these can help you build a blueprint for makes an excellent example and prepare your own list.The point of this exercise is to have enough examples for different kinds of situations so that you can easily pick the right one in the right context without wasting much time in the exam hall.

II. Case studies

More than the theory part, case studies bring out our ethical dilemmas and logical reasoning sharply. Done well, they can propel your score beyond 110. Gone wrong, they may restrict your marks to under 90.

The purpose of case studies is to make you ready for the field experience. Once you enter the civil service, you may face situations in which competing values clash. Would you strictly adhere to rules or stay flexible at times to help the needy? Would you suspend an erring subordinate, thereby curtailing his income, or overlook his misdeeds and close it with a warning, considering his dependent family? These are the real-life situations a civil servant confronts on a daily basis. Through case studies, the examiner can understand how you might behave if you were in a similar situation. So, one of the foremost tips (and one of the obvious) is to put yourself in the shoes of an administrator, and consider yourself a problem solver. This makes the whole exercise enjoyable and inevitably your answers exude passion and cogent articulation.

In this component, we will go through some pointers which can help you answer the case studies well.

A standard framework for answers

Having a concrete framework ready while answering gives a sense of flow, coherence and structure to your case study. Else, it

faces the risk of steering away from the question and exceeding the word limit. Therefore, it’s helpful to categorise your answer under the following subheadings:

•  Subject Matter : Briefly in a line or two, capture the entire case study. E.g. In a case Study dealing with an IAS aspirant heading for Interview but sees an accident on the way, subject Matter could be: Dilemma between achieving career ambition and responding to the accident as a good samaritan.

•  Stakeholders : List down the set of people who would be directly and indirectly affected in the case. For instance, you are the CEO of a PSU which is facing severe unionism and strikes, affecting company profits. Stakeholders are yourself, employees, government, public at large, local families, investors, and shareholders. You may also represent this information through a spoke and wheel diagram.

•  EthicalDilemmas/KeyPrinciples :Enumeratetheethicalissues in the case study. This is a crucial part of your answer since you explicitly mention the conflicting values you face in your judgement. For instance, in a case involving mining in a tribal inhabited forest, ethical issues will be: development vs. nature conservation; public interest vs protection of tribal land rights; economic growth vs equitable prosperity. Mention these issues in bullet points, sequentially.

•  Options Available to You : Write 3-4 choices you have in the scenario, along with the pros and cons of choosing each alternative. Two choices inevitably will be the extreme options, which are generally avoided as your choice. The remaining ones should be the practical courses of action you wish to pursue.

•  Choosing an Option : Under this subheading, write about the course of action which can be a combination of the above mentioned options. It should be followed by clear articulation of your arguments (more on this below) along with quotes and examples to substantiate your point of view. The best option to choose in any given situation is not the most original but the most practical. If you come up with a spectacular innovative idea, but isn’t easily implementable, it’s as good as doing nothing. Search for options that can be executed amidst the constraints a govt servant faces. For instance, let’s say in your district, tribals are agitating against a mining company planning to raze the forests and explore the mineral wealth. In such a case, a decision to put a complete ban or a moratorium on mining in your district is impractical and sub-optimal. By

prohibiting any form of mining, you will not help the cause of tribals who would have benefited from the new employment opportunities in the region. So choose an option in which you balance competing interests.

Articulation

Articulation is the beating heart of a case study answer. This follows ‘choosing an option’ section we discussed above.

In this segment, you reason out why you chose a particular option and elaborate on the further of course of action. More than the option you choose, it is the reasoning that led you to choose that particular option that matters more. It’s helpful to narrate from the first person point of view: Use I, wherever possible. It will personalise your answer and therefore carries the weight of a good argument. But, use your discretion based on your experiences on which perspective you want to use.

The course of action you wish to pursue must be mentioned in detail, enumerating the steps clearly. Put yourself in the shoes of the administrator, dive into the details, and make your answer as vivid and concrete as possible. Let me illustrate this through the following examples:

Consider a case study dealing with gender issues in the district. Don’t write something vague saying you will ensure women empowerment in the area. Describe concrete steps by writing on

the lines of: I will try to set up a livelihood opportunity based on their skills, help them produce marketable goods, procure that material in all govt departments, and then encourage local private sector to buy these goods. Quote examples of successful models like SEWA, Prajwala, Lijjat papad etc.

In a case relating to negligent monitoring of government schemes or projects, instead of saying I will collaborate with NGOs to ensure third party accountability, a better way of conveying would be: “I will speak to the reputed local NGOs, hold a meeting with them to take their views. I will give them specific inputs as to when they can go and inspect the schemes and project works discreetly and report to me in person or through WhatsApp.” You can substantiate with a real life example how such Socialcops played a terrific role in effective implementation of Ujjwala Yojana.

Consider a hypothetical case in which you are posted as the DM of a resource-poor district that has a history of vector-borne disease outbreaks. Monsoon season is approaching and you have to prepare for the challenge with limited funds at your disposal. You can narrate the following concrete steps. “Based on the previous years’ data, I will rank specific blocks in terms of their vulnerability and prioritise these hotspots for immediate attention. Fogging shall be done and anti-mosquito nets shall be distributed to these blocks on priority. Intense training sessions will be provided for ASHAs to help them detect of malaria/dengue promptly. I will use the District Mineral Fund (if available) and local CSR funds to procure rapid diagnostic kits. I shall designate every Friday as Dry-day where households in the district will be encouraged to drain out

stagnant water along with conducting a weekly review meeting with all health workers from village level to district level to assess preparedness and correct any issues.”

For a case on eradicating child marriages in a remote area, instead of saying “I will ensure awareness on the subject and adherence to law”, write— “I will take part in bi-weekly Gram Sabha sessions and make the community take a pledge against child marriages. I shall encourage rallies by school children and officers of all government departments. To monitor the on ground situation, I shall depute my officers as special officers responsible for set of blocks where they will tour, discreetly inspect and report back to me. I will monitor complaints and grievances on the issue and ensure a resolution within 30 days.” It helps to mention Govt. schemes like Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana or slogans such as Meri Beti-Mera Garv.

In a case where you, as the Chief, must change the work culture in your office— “At the start of every month, I will conduct a one-on-one meeting with each of my officers, take them into confidence and set mutually agreed goals. At the end of the month, I shall review each officer’s performance against these preset goals and rate them as per objective criteria. Best performers shall be given a letter of appreciation under my letterhead and put a copy of it on the notice board for others to see. The laggards shall be given a warning and if they don’t heed, I will initiate disciplinary action as per the rules to ensure deterrence.”

I don’t mean to say these are the only solutions to these case studies. The point is whatever be your decision, be concrete and specific. It will strike the examiner as practical and implementable.

Towards the end of your answer, quoting a relevant thinker’s opinion or quote gives credence to your decision. For instance, if the ethical issue is about professional integrity, E Sreedharan and his leadership in executing a complex rail project should be quoted as an example. Or let’s take a case study in which you are faced with a decision whether to give clearance to an important road project through a National Park (thereby helping the government save taxpayer’s money) or devising an alternate, but more expensive option (thereby preserving the ecosystem, but hurting govt finances). If you opt for the second option, you can stress on the importance of environmental economics and end with a quote saying:

As environmentalist Wangari Maathai said,  “We need to promote development that does not destroy our environment”.

Just the addition of the above sentence makes the argument more powerful. Your arguments now have the moral backing of an eminent personality. The value mapping exercise we did for the theory section will be helpful here. So for every case study, try and add such relevant quotes to substantiate your points. It will show that you not only read the works of those eminent people, but also understand how to apply their teachings in real-life.

Observe Time Limit

There is a tendency among aspirants to dedicate disproportionate time to case studies. But, remember that they are worth only 120 marks. Irrespective of whether you start with theory portion or the case studies, dedicate time proportionate to their weightage for marks. So for case studies, you should spend the maximum of 90 minutes i.e. 15 minutes per case study.

Further, you should realise that UPSC can change how it distributes marks across questions, but it cannot change the 250 marks assigned to a paper (without prior notice). So, whatever be the number of questions or distribution of marks across those questions, your target must be to write 80 marks worth of answers in the first hour, another 80 in the second hour and 90 in the final hour. This translates to 40 marks in the initial 30 minutes. So whether you start with Part A or Part B, aim to finish questions worth 40 marks in the first half-hour and then repeat this process. Always have an eye on the clock and if you think you are falling behind time, accelerate.

Gain Adequate Practice

Ethics paper has an emphasis on articulation and practical examples, which comes only with adequate practice. Besides, case studies across the years tend to have similar themes and ideas. So answering a lot of these beforehand will give you a sense of confidence to tackle any type of question.

III. Sample Answers

Q. How could social influence and persuasion contribute to the success of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan? (10 Marks)

Social influence is the process through which a person’s attitudes, opinions, or behaviour are changed through social communication. Persuasion is a method of social influence.

Social influence and persuasion contribute to Swacch Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) through:

•  Behavioural change among all the stakeholders : By changing attitude toward open defecation in the society through campaigns and media. E.g: Darwaza Band campaign and rallies by school children to build awareness

•  Social pressure and peer pressure : By naming and shaming people who don’t have toilets, they will be forced to build one.

E.g: Children persuading their parents, Gram sabhas reading out names of households without toilets. Positive peer pressure in the form of prizes and rewards for building and using toilets can also help people change.

•  Role-Model effect:  When celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan persuade for SBA, it can bring about a change in orthodox opinions about open defecation.

•  Community Ownership : Through Gram Swachhdhoots, SBA can be made community driven to make it . Such persuasive methods were very successful in Bangladesh.

•  Healthy competition among stakeholders : through initiatives like Swacch Survekshan.

Thus social Influence and persuasion techniques, by effectively targeting the social psyche and behaviour can accelerate the goal of Swacch Bharat Mission.

Q. You are aspiring to become an IAS officer and you have cleared various stages and now you have been selected for the personal interview. On the day of the interview, on the way to the venue you saw an accident where a mother and child who happen to be your relatives were badly injured. They needed immediate help. What would you have done in such a situation? Justify your action. (25 Marks)

Subject matter:  Dilemma between achieving career ambition Vs responding to accident as a good samaritan.

Stakeholders involved:  The mother, child, me, my family, society at large and the UPSC.

Ethical dilemmas :

• Personal ambitions vs. Moral responsibility to help others • Being punctual to the interview vs Saving life • Personal and family’s dream to be civil servant vs Moral

obligation to relatives

Options Available

Final Course of action

I shall choose the last option because I have a moral responsibility to help the victims, and a personal responsibility to myself, my family and my career. I worked hard to reach the interview stage, so it makes sense to balance both these obligations.

So my immediate response would be to quickly move the victims to my cab. Using Google Maps, I’ll check for nearby hospitals and find the shortest route possible to get there. I will call the hospital and ask them to arrange emergency services by the time we reach.

Along the way, I will also call the relatives’ family and ask them to reach the hospital. I will admit the victim to the hospital and pay any charges, if required. If it gets late for the relatives to reach, I will entrust the cab driver to kindly look after her, pay him his waiting charges and proceed to the interview.

In the meantime, I will also check if I can reach out to anyone who can inform the interview panel about my situation and that I may reach late. If I do get delayed, I will make every attempt to convince the authorities involved as to the reasons why it happened. As soon as the interview is done, I will come back to the hospital and check on the victims’ condition and help them in anyway I can.

As remarked by Gandhiji  “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others” . By helping people, we not only make the world a better place but also stay true to our conscience. It leads to harmony, balancing social good with personal ambition.

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42 thoughts on “ How to Answer GS 4 Ethics Paper in UPSC Mains ”

Hey anudeep, thank you so much for the invaluable insights you have provided us in your book. Its a wonderful piece of your hard work. I got so much to learn from it. Thank you so much. God bless you 🙂

Glad to hear that. Thank you!

क्या आपकी पुस्तक हिंदी में या फिर English में

Sir please can you tell me that this is ebook or it is hard copy?Will it be delivered to our home?

Sir meru guidance esthara

Sir how you learn fluent english Please give reply sir

respected sir , i have made the payment of 389 for essay answer writing book and videos but still it is showing to pay the amount . how should i access the book ? plz reply it would be helpful for me . thanking u regards maithili

Anna nv super anna I am full inspired

Sir which pen you used??

Sir start the YouTube channel for village people’s

Meru e book videos freega endhuku cheyatam ledhu, afford cheyaleni aspirants me valuble suggestions ela telusukuntaru ?

Kya main BA karke CSE apply karskta ho Apki 5 tips aur konsi konsi books Leno chahiye…

Good Evening sir, I want to write GS paper in English and take Hindi Literature. It’s possible or not.

Yes,Of course. Explanation: If your optional is a literature paper then you have to write those optional papers in that very language. Except them, all papers, Essay and G.S I, II, III, IV are to be written only in Hindi or English. So, You can choose English as your medium and Hindi Literature as your optionals.

Wonderful Sir Salute to your hard work and perseverance You are a true IAS officer,dedicated to Steve your country’s people.

Sir. 1.May I know which online platform for prelims and mains test series is the good one ? 2 .whether to join integrated prelims and mains or separate prelims and separate mains test series? 3.what is the right time to join ?

Sir I am unable to open the video lectures of your book..as those videos are unsupported in my mobile…sir Its a …….please send me those videos in my gmail account as your each video and lecture is very important to me and all the upsc aspirants..

Really it is very helpful for the beginners.. Thank you so much anudeep sir.

for beginners it will give full clarity on how be a good thinker and on track aspirants it will give value addition. we good to see u providing this enormous information which u are giving for aspirants. THANK YOU BRO..KEEP ON GIVE THIS BOOST TO ASPIRANTS

Sir Thankyou very much for this book .Immensely helpful.Sir is your book enough for upsc preparation if we understand it and like this way.

Will you release new editions in the upcoming years?? Or is this book useful for upsc 2022 please reply sir….

Sir is this only e-book or can I get its hard copy ? If yes can I know how to get it .

Thanks a ton sir! What an exaplanation you have presented before us. I cleared all doubts and ambiguities related to paper 4. thanks again sir .love you sir..

Thank you sir

Tnq so much resp. Sir..! Valuable guidance for us…To clear all doubts regarding paper IV.🙏

Hello Sir, Your ethics notes are very concise and effective and I am grateful to you for providing these notes. One thing i can’t make out is the LMR you’ve written at certain places with an highlighter. Please decode this puzzle so that I can be at peace.😭🙏

‘Last Minute Revision’ 🙂

Thanks a lot sir ji one day i will join in your group

Thank u very much sir 😊 such a wonderful explanation for the beginers like me. Keep going in writing such awesome books like this. Actually sreaching for good network ,I think this is the correct platform for not only me but also all the asparents … Thank u sir from the bottom of the heat 😁

Hello Sir, but sir from where i get all quotes.

Your advice is solid. This is amazingly articulated with detailed suggestions. Thank you so much for this. Hope you’re doing well as an IAS officer, best wishes.

Sir it’s an honour to have read this chapter! Thanks a lot for publishing the book! I’ve placed my order and am eagerly awaiting. Thanks once again, Sir. I believe that you are a blessing to all the aspirants. I hope to clear the exam with flying colors and meet you in person to share my respect and admiration for you! I’m from Hyderabad and it feels so proud to be associated with the land where you come from. Believe me, coming from the bottom of my heart. 🙏😊

A warm good afternoon sir! the way you present your answers really awesome sir. sir my small request you to present upsc prelims and mains best books to aspirants ,to clear upsc.

Thank you so much sir for giving well knowledge about answer writing in UPSC mains iam froam Warangal I hope that iam become a civil servant with your blessings sir..

I have to appear in CSE in 2024…so when should I start preparing Ethics..?

Sir please start YouTube channel sir for village people sir

If above case studies come true in life, should I persue the same as given in elaboration. And if I got delayed, I would be entertained for the interview…if “yes” its ok and if not… I can go with court help..

Now it’s clear that how to score good in ethics. Thank you so much for this. 😊

Hello sir , Good evening

Sir i want to write my gs and essay papers in regional language. and going to choose literature of that language too. But the thing is authentic material is not available in this language …so i have decided to read in eng. And translate in my notes in my language….is it advisable ?? Or should i improve my english writing skills ? Or can i reach that level of eng. Writing in a year ?

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7 Ethics Case Studies Students Should Use to Gain Inspiration from

1. Copyright Concerns by Clare Barlett

“Copyright Concerns” is an excellent case study that lays out the importance of copyright in the tech industry. The paper discusses how a computer start-up company is on the verge of violating copyright laws if it chooses to re-use a code that belongs to another company.

2. Freedom of  Speech, Facebook & Teens Worldwide by Irina Raicu

Should Facebook permit teens under 13 to open an account? Should the social media giant set different rules and regulations for the under-aged? This case study caters to such questions, and it rises up some pretty intriguing points. It will definitely bring more value into your ethical college paper.

3. Using the “Holocaust” Metaphor by Jill Hamilton

PETA’s 2003 campaign, “Holocaust on Your Plate” compares animal slaughtering with the infamous Holocaust event that led to the death of nearly 6 million Jews. Is the analogy right or wrong? Is it ethical to use such a metaphor or not? If you’re writing a paper on animals’ rights, then this case study is a great source to get inspired from.

4.  The Drinking Age: The Ethics Behind Change by Logan Peterson

The legal drinking age in the US is 21. In other countries, it’s 18. Should the United States lower the number, or not? There are certain risks associated with under-aged drinking, although many students don’t care about any of them. This ethics case study highlights some clear points on alcohol consumption by the youth. It should definitely inspire you to write an amazing paper.

5.  Browsing or Cyberstalking by Akshay Vyas

Should checking up on your ex or even close friends on social media be considered stalking? This ethical case study focuses on the pros and cons of this idea, and the arguments are quite plausible. Some say there’s a line that people often cross, especially since Facebook doesn’t let its users see who checked their profile or how many times their profile was viewed by someone.

6.  Placing Unreasonable Expectations on a Student by CCAB

Many students are pressured to perform an unreasonable amount of work when they get a new job, in spite of their lack of experience. This case study talks about the difference between constructive and destructive feedback at the work place, so it should definitely be useful when writing an ethics essay, term paper or thesis.

7. We’ve Got You Covered by Pat Wolfe and Others

This ethics study focuses on a registered nurse’s incompetent behavior and inability to care for his patients. If you’re writing a paper in the medical field, tackling this subject and mentioning this case study will definitely improve the value of your paper.

There lots of interesting ethics case studies out there to gain inspiration from. It all depends on your paper’s main subject. Check out the ones we’ve mentioned and take your college paper on to the next level.

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Innovative program at Thunderbird transforms students into case writing experts

Euvin Naidoo, distinguished professor of practice in global accounting, risk and agility at Thunderbird School of Global Management, teaches during the Summer Case Writing program.

Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University recently launched an innovative program to empower students to co-create with professors and learn more about the art of effective case writing.

Launched by  Mary Teagarden , deputy dean of Thunderbird Knowledge Enterprise and professor of global strategy and  Euvin Naidoo , distinguished professor of practice in global accounting, risk and agility at Thunderbird, the Summer Case Writing program is serving as a catalyst for students to collaborate with professors through an in-depth immersion into the art and science of case writing. Now in its second year, the program emphasizes the importance of storytelling as a vital skill for management leaders, teaching students the nuances of effective communication.

“We are proud of our ability to not only lead, but drive innovation by developing cutting-edge approaches to education that transforms our learners into leaders,” said  Charla Griffy-Brown , director general and dean of Thunderbird. “By blending creativity and analytical thinking, students are now emerging as skilled communicators capable of tackling real-world executive challenges.”

Students are taught the fundamental elements—or DNA—of effective communication by adopting the perspective of top executives, or CxOs, where 'CxO' stands for chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer. This involves understanding how to craft and convey messages in a manner that resonates with senior leadership and stakeholders, focusing on strategic thinking, clarity, and impact.

“By viewing communication through the eyes of high-level executives, our students learn to create compelling narratives that address critical business issues, drive decision-making, and lead global teams effectively,” added Griffy-Brown.

This year the program attracted 20 students, many of whom balanced full-time internships and summer commitments while they participated in the immersive experience. The course was designed to help students blend their creative and analytical skills, building muscle memory to emerge as more effective communicators. Students noted a highlight of the experience were the guest speakers, all senior global leaders, who joined during the evening sessions to lead in-depth discussions.

“Over the course of the summer, the program had several leaders including the COO of a leading Hollywood studio who connected with students on the importance of continuously practicing skills, including the art of effective listening and the value of having all voices be heard resulting in better products being created,” said Naidoo.

The approach of the program has garnered attention and praise from  The Case Centre team in the United Kingdom, who regard it as one of the most unique programs globally for its structured methodology in empowering students to learn about effective case writing and communication.

“Through this initiative, we have been able to work with students to support their efforts to create something original,” said Naidoo. “Each case is a new piece of intellectual property being added to the management lexicon.”

The Case Centre is the world’s leading independent hub and authority on case method education, dedicated to sharing knowledge and inspiring transformation in business education worldwide. Recently, their executive team visited Thunderbird Global Headquarters and met with school leadership and faculty.

Their visit to Thunderbird underscores the significance and global impact of the Summer Case Writing program. According to the Case Centre, the case method remains an irreplaceable cornerstone of management education, with over 1,000 organizations across 85 countries utilizing their cases in the 2022-23 academic year. Thunderbird’s contribution includes 22 new cases since 2022, adding to a robust collection of over 480 cases, many of which come with accompanying instructor materials, software, and videos. Notably, six of these are prize-winning cases from Thunderbird, highlighting the school’s excellence in case development.

For Professors Naidoo and Teagarden, the summer program is not only about teaching students to write cases but also about transforming their engagement with potential employers and industry leaders.

“Asking a company or an executive for a job is one thing; we have the mindset of supporting our students to become creators of new knowledge and insights in a sector via writing a case, so they are now of interest to a company or leader,” said Naidoo. “This shift in approach changes the dialogue, positioning students as valuable contributors who bring fresh perspectives and solutions to the table.”

“We see this summer program as empowering our students to change their engagement both with a sector and a topic but also the job market. We want Thunderbird to be a place for students across the U.S. and globally to see as transformational to both learning and career trajectory,” said Teagarden. “This unique structured summer offering is but one example of how we blend theory and practice to support our wonderful students.”

The success of the Summer Case Writing program has also inspired the creation of a student-led case writing club, launched last year.

“The club, now one of the most popular and fast-growing at Thunderbird, exemplifies the school’s commitment to fostering student leadership and curiosity,” Naidoo continues. “It provides a platform for students to continue their case-writing journey, creating more cases and accelerating their knowledge and connections in various industries.”

The impact of Thunderbird’s case-writing initiatives is reflected in its  recent recognition by The Case Centre , ranking in the top 10 for global impact in faculty research and case writing in the U.S. and top 20 worldwide. This accolade underscores the school’s dedication to advancing management education and empowering students to become effective communicators and leaders.

“Our faculty are deeply engaged in researching and developing case studies based on complex global business scenarios. These cases are meticulously written to provoke thought and discussion, making them invaluable tools in both degree programs and executive education environments,” said Griffy-Brown.

The  Thunderbird Case Series , created in 1997 and co-led by Naidoo and Teagarden, offers a rich repository of these cases, available for purchase and used worldwide to illustrate real-world management challenges and solutions.

“We hope other schools follow suit to empower students to be co-creators, growing their skill sets to continue practicing being effective communicators,” concludes Naidoo. “Thunderbird’s commitment to innovation and excellence in education ensures that our students are well-prepared to lead and make a significant impact in the global business arena.”

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Chapter 4: Case Studies

An introduction to the case studies in Ethics in the Science Classroom.

The teaching of ethics is particularly suited to the use of illustrative case studies. Such narratives can be used to present examples of a range of significant ethical issues related to some human enterprise and many of the complexities associated with each of the issues. The cases can be either fictional or they can be based on actual events.

In our Summer Institute instructional program we used a series of real-life case studies to illustrate several of the key ethical issues related to science. The teachers found these cases helpful in enhancing their in-depth understanding of the issue and in suggesting practical topics for the development of classroom ethics lessons.

In this chapter we present six such case studies, including five that were used, to good effect, during our Summer Institute instructional program. Each is based on a real case. The cases and major associated ethics issues are: Overly Ambitious Researchers -- Fabricating Data (scientific misconduct); The Millkan Case (issues related to the collection, treatment and presentation of scientific data); The Tuskegee Syphilis Study (issues concerning research on human subjects and the influence of racial prejudice on science); The Search For the Structure of DNA (competition vs. cooperation, and sexism in science); The XYY Controversy (genetics and biotechnology research issues); and Love Canal (environmental protection issues).

Each case includes:

1- Introduction . A discussion of the nature and significance of the types of moral issues raised in the case.

2- Background. Background discussion designed to place the case in an appropriate context.

3- Case Study. A narrative presentation of the particulars of the case.

4- Readings and Resources. A brief list of suggested readings (as well as videos and other educational material) that can be consulted to get a more thorough understanding of the case in question, related cases, and the associated ethics/values issue.

5- The Issues. Sets of questions designed to elicit thought and exploration concerning both the specific ethics/values issues raised by the case, as well as related issues.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2055332. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Thwaites Glacier won’t collapse like dominoes as feared, study finds, but that doesn’t mean the ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is stable

Professor of Earth Sciences, Dartmouth College

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Mathieu Morlighem receives funding from NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Heising Simons Foundation, and Dartmouth College.

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Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier got its nickname the “ Doomsday Glacier ” for its potential to flood coastlines around the world if it collapsed. It is already contributing about 4% of annual sea-level rise as it loses ice, and one theory suggests the glacier could soon begin to collapse into the ocean like a row of dominoes.

But is that kind of rapid collapse really as likely as feared? A new study of Thwaites Glacier’s susceptibility to what’s known as marine ice cliff instability offers some hope. But the findings don’t mean Thwaites is stable.

Polar scientist Mathieu Morlighem , who led the study, explains the results.

Why is the Thwaites Glacier so important?

Thwaites Glacier drains a huge area of Antarctica’s ice sheet – about 74,000 square miles (192,000 square kilometers), an expanse bigger than Florida. If a snowflake falls within that drainage system, it will eventually end up as part of an iceberg in the ocean off Thwaites.

What we are seeing with Thwaites Glacier right now is a disaster in slow motion.

The bedrock under Thwaites Glacier sits below sea level and slopes downward going inland , so the glacier gets deeper toward the interior of the ice sheet. Once the glacier begins losing more ice than it gains from new snowfall and starts to retreat, it’s very hard to slow it down because of this slope. And Thwaites is already retreating at an accelerating rate as the climate warms.

Thwaites Glacier holds enough ice to raise global sea level by more than 2 feet (0.65 meters). Once Thwaites starts to destabilize, it also will destabilize neighboring glaciers . So, what happens to Thwaites affects all of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and that affects sea-level rise along coastlines everywhere.

What is marine ice cliff instability?

Marine ice cliff instability is a relatively new concept proposed by scientists in the past decade.

Many of the glaciers around Antarctica have huge floating extensions called ice shelves that buttress the glacier and slow its ice flow into the ocean. With the climate warming, we have seen some of these floating extensions collapse, sometimes very rapidly , in the span of a few weeks or months.

If Thwaites’ ice shelf were to collapse, it would expose a very tall ice cliff facing the ocean along its 75-mile (120-kilometer) front . There is only so much force that ice can sustain, so if the cliff is too tall, it will collapse into the ocean.

Once that happens, a new ice cliff farther back would be exposed, and the new cliff would be even taller because it is farther inland. The theory of marine ice cliff instability suggests that if the cliffs collapse quickly enough, that could have a domino effect of ever-higher ice cliffs collapsing one after the other.

However, no one has observed marine ice cliff instability in action. We don’t know if it will happen, because a lot depends on how quickly the ice collapses.

What did you discover about the risk to Thwaites?

When the theory of marine ice cliff instability was first introduced, it used a rough approximation of how ice cliffs might collapse once the ice shelf was gone.

Studies since then have determined that ice cliffs won’t fail systematically until the ice is about 442 feet (135 meters) high. Even at that point, they would fail more slowly than projected until they became much taller.

We used three high-resolution models to explore what this new physical understanding of ice cliff instability would mean for Thwaites Glacier this century.

Our results show that if Thwaites’ entire ice shelf collapsed today, its ice front would not rapidly retreat inland due to marine ice cliff instability alone. Without the ice shelf, the glacier’s ice would flow much faster toward the ocean, thinning the front of the glacier. As a result, the ice cliffs wouldn’t be as high.

We found that Thwaites would remain fairly stable at least through 2100. We also simulated an ice shelf collapse in 50 years, when the glacier’s grounding line – where its grounded ice meets the ocean – would have retreated deeper inland. Even then, we found that marine ice cliff instability alone would not cause a rapid retreat.

The results call into question some recent estimates of just how fast Thwaites might collapse. That includes a worst-case scenario that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mentioned in its latest assessment report but labeled as “low likelihood.”

Thwaites is the glacier everyone is worried about. If you model the entire ice sheet, this is where marine ice cliff instability starts and where it propagates far inland . So, if Thwaites isn’t as vulnerable to ice cliff failure as we thought, that’s a good sign for the entire ice sheet.

But marine ice cliff instability is only one mechanism of ice loss. This finding doesn’t mean Thwaites is stable.

What else is causing glaciers to retreat at an accelerating rate?

There are many processes that make the Antarctic ice sheet unstable, some of them very well understood.

Ice-ocean interactions explain most of the recent ice mass loss so far. Antarctica is a very cold place , so atmospheric warming isn’t having a large effect yet. But warm ocean currents are getting under the ice shelves, and they are thinning the ice from below , which weakens the ice shelves. When that happens, the ice streams flow faster because there is less resistance.

Over the past few decades , the Amundsen Sea sector, where Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers are located, has seen an intrusion of warm water from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which has been melting the ice from below .

What does climate change have to do with it?

Antarctica can seem like a faraway place, but human activities that warm the planet – such as burning fossil fuels – are having dramatic effects at the poles. Ice loss contributes to sea-level rise, affecting coastal regions around the world.

People’s choices today will determine how quickly the water rises.

• Climate change
• Sea level rise
• West Antarctic ice sheet
• Antarctic ice sheet
• Thwaites glacier

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