STILL THE MORAL CHILD

Consider the following scenario. Julia has been working for a large, national public relations and marketing firm since she received her PR degree five years ago. She considers herself to be a ˜go-getter. ˜Driven is how most of her friends from university put it. For five years she's worked 60 to 80 hours a week and pulled her share of all-nighters to meet those deadlines. Although she has found it exhilarating and somewhat rewarding , she doesn't believe she has been rewarded quite fast enough. In fact, she's looking for a way to get that promotion and rise that seem to have eluded her for the past year or two.

But a new client's file has just landed on her desk and she knows how she can solve their public relations problem and come out looking like a creative genius. There's only one catch. The solution she knows will work involves using a bit of information that she gleaned while working on a communication audit for one of the new client's competitors .

After work on Friday, Julia meets two of her old friends from university for a drink at a downtown bar. While they're happily sequestered in a private booth , sipping Martinis, Julia casually mentions her genius idea for her new client.

˜You can't do that, says one friend, the PR director of a small IT company. ˜It's wrong.

˜I agree, says the other friend, a media relations consultant. ˜What would you do if you got caught?

It seems that Julia's friends, both in the same field as she is, are in agreement: using that piece of proprietary information for her own gain, or even the gain of a client, shouldn't be done. Are they right? Their answers might be the same, but their motivations for them are quite different. Is one of these friends more right than the other? The answer depends upon how important it is to you to do the right thing for the right reasons. And the reasons we act ethically depend largely on the level of moral development that we are demonstrating at that point, limited by the extent to which we have developed at all.