After talking about precautionary and proactionary concepts in class this week i really thought hard about what approach is best for an IT business, or any business rather, to take in today's market. It is becoming harder and harder to compete in the marketplace, forcing firms to make tough choices and cut already diminishing budgets. However, I feel that that does not give said firm the right to "chince" out on it's corporate social responsibility nor it's committment to its customers/clients.
I feel that whenever a business is operating in a life or death situation, or even severly life altering circumstances, it ought to be their responsibility to check and make sure that all data involved are correct, and then act ethically and appropriatly on that data. In my own personal opinion i feel that people in general should follow some set of ethics, i tend to follow deontological ethics, which just means ethics based on moral rules and the idea of duty. As with the example from class about the old man who lost his home to foreclosure because the bank had no reocrd on their computers that he had been making payments, i feel it was the bank's fault for not keeping accurate records, and furthermore the banking firm should've done more to help the customer transition to the new system. If the firm had followed a more precautionary system whn making the record keeping change maybe they could;ve avoided this whole mess!
