Jessica Banks, a Ph. D student in Professor Brian Hayward’s lab, is finishing up her studies and is ready to set out for her new job at mid-sized liberal arts college. Even though Banks is setting off for her new job she still would like to further her studies from Hayward’s lab. However when Banks went to pick up her notebooks Hayward explained that she couldn’t because they belonged to the lab. Banks stressed her case as best she could, yet Hayward comments with, “This lab is a joint enterprise, and all the work you did was funded by money I brought in via grants.” Seeing that she cannot get the notebooks, Banks wants to copy the note books in the lab when Hayward is not present.
Within this case there are professional codes and ethical codes that are going head to head, which causes confusion. Professional codes are agreements within a group, the values that are set in stone. Whereas ethical codes are the values we live by in general, honesty and fairness. In most cases professional codes overturn ethical codes, for they were already agreed upon by the group. In The Jessica Banks Case there seems to be no evidence of professional codes, unless the joint enterprise came upon an agreement and signed a contract regarding the work in the notebooks being funded via grants. If true, this is a bad professional code because what is right for one person is not for the other.
The enterprise uses consequentialist that focus on the results of our actions, deciding whether or not an action is good by looking at the consequences. Maybe they fear that valuable information will come out of the student’s studies and they want to be the only ones to have it. Dr. Herkert points out that, “professional codes are context specific to the tasks and skills at hand and that to talk about moral dilemmas in the abstract is not useful. What makes sense is to be concrete since issues relevant to one profession may be irrelevant to another .” In relation to the case he is stating...