Quiz: Ethics unlimited?
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Find out what an ethical career means to you. Test yourself with our 10 yes or no ethical dilemmas.
Yes or no?
1. You work for an environmental campaign group and need to go to a vital one-day conference on climate change in the south of Spain. Flying there will take a couple of hours each way. Going by train will take days and cost your campaign twice as much. Do you go by plane?
2. You campaign at work/university for proper rights and pay for garment workers in the developing world. A major clothes retailer, which has been linked to exploitative labour practices, headhunts you to work for its new Social Responsibility Unit. Your experience, they say, will help them examine the problem. Do you work for them?
3. You've just landed your dream job for a children's charity after years of trying. You then find out it invests in arms companies. The finance director says the investments help save lives and won't withdraw them. Do you resign?
4. You've spent much of your time at university campaigning on ethical issues, on everything from gay rights to the World Trade Organisation. Now you're applying for jobs in companies that aren't particularly ethical, but not too bad either. Do you put your campaign work on your CV?
5. One of your best friends gets a job with a major drugs firm that refuses to allow cheap copies of its life saving medicines to be produced in the developing world. Do you have a word?
6. You're in loads of debt and struggling to keep up the payments on your accommodation. Your temping agency offers you the only work around: packing cosmetics for a company you know tests on animals. Do you a take it?
7. You're offered a job with an organisation that helps asylum seekers, and receives most of its funding from the government. Critics say the group doesn't challenge government policies enough because of its funding. The organisation says without that funding it would have to close. Do you accept the job?
8. You're offered a job with a social justice campaign that the tabloids have linked to violent protests in the past. The organisation says it's not involved, but won't condemn the protesters' actions. Do you take the job?
9. You're a senior manager in an aid agency working in a war zone. Things are getting dangerous for your staff, but there are still thousands of civilians needing help. One of the belligerent armies offers your workers protection. Do you accept?
10. You have to choose between two careers: a non ethical job that's well paid, giving you loads of extra cash to donate to charities and campaign groups, or an ethical job that's poorly paid. Do you go for the money?
COMPARE YOUR RESPONSE
This Ethical Careers Challenge appeared at www.ethicalcareers.org between August 2004 and January 2005.
Here's how web users responded:
