Re: Ethics and Job-Hunting

[Alan -dot- Miller -at- prometric -dot- com]

Very interesting thread.

Had a Lit Prof in college who had drawn his line at the Vietnam War. He
would purchase no product made by any company that supplied the military.
Or so he said. At one point in the course <g> of the class he planned to
play a recorded version of one of the novels we were studying. He used his
own phonograph (for you that don't know what this is, or have never seen
one ... well, look it up), not wanting to even give the appearance of
compromising his ethics by using university property that *might* be
somehow connected to the war. That phonograph was some brand I have never
heard of before or since.

Being the curious type that I am, I inquired as to how he was able to
determine that the maker of that particular product was not a supplier of
the war. He said he received a regularly updated list of defense
contractors from one of the many anti-war groups he belonged to, and that
this company was not on it. At that time, my personal view of the wars was
one of enlightened self-interest. That is, being of draft age, anything
that hastened the cessation of hostilities was okay with me. This, however,
seemed silly. I asked if he know who supplied the electronic components of
the phonograph, and were they on the List. I then asked what his family ate
for dinner the previous evening. I explained that the military commissary
system purchased prodigious quantities of name-brand products through
regional distributors and wholesalers, and not from the manufacturers. The
discussion became somewhat animated (on his part), and we never did listen
to the recording.

The point of this being ... we have all draw our lines somewhere. The
reasons have less to do with ethics and more to do with our personal
definitions of morality. And most assuredly nothing to do with logic or
consistency, as my parable illustrates. We all find something repugnant,
and refuse to participate. (I avoid certain activities involving multiple
species.) Why is probably illogical to anyone but ourselves. That's okay,
as long as we recognize it for what it is and move on.

Just my dollar-two-ninety-eight.

Regards,
Al Miller
Chief Documentation Curmudgeon
Prometric, Inc. a division of Thomson Learning, Inc.
Baltimore, MD


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