Considerations in Ethical Decision-Making and Software Piracy

Individuals are faced with the many opportunities to pirate. The decision to pirate or not may be related to an individual's attitudes toward other ethical issues. A person's ethical and moral predispositions and the judgments that they use to make decisions may be consistent across various ethical dilemmas and may indicate their likelihood to pirate software. This paper investigates the relationship between religion and a theoretical ethical decision making process that an individual uses when evaluating ethical or unethical situations. An ethical decision making model was studied for general unethical scenarios and for the unethical behavior of software piracy. The research model was tested via path analysis using structural equation modeling and was found to be appropriate for the sample data. The results suggest that there is a relationship between religion and the stages of an ethical decision making process regarding general ethical situations and software piracy.

[1]  John P. Fraedrich,et al.  The ethical behavior of retail managers , 1993 .

[2]  Chee-Sing Yap,et al.  Testing an Ethical Decision-Making Theory: The Case of Softlifting , 1998, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[3]  Ernest W. King,et al.  THE EFFECT OF ATTORNEYS’PERCEIVED DUTY TO CLIENT ON THEIR ETHICAL DECISION MAKING PROCESS , 1996 .

[4]  Susan J. Harrington,et al.  A Test of a Person -- Issue Contingent Model of Ethical Decision Making in Organizations , 1997 .

[5]  R. Ford,et al.  Ethical decision making: A review of the empirical literature , 1994 .

[6]  James R. Rest.  Moral Development: Advances in Research and Theory , 1986 .

[7]  Gloria E. Wheeler,et al.  An empirical study of ethical predispositions , 1996 .

[8]  Anusorn Singhapakdi,et al.  Research Note: Selected Factors Influencing Marketers' Deontological Norms , 1991 .

[9]  Lawrence J. Marks,et al.  An Empirical Investigation of a General Theory of Marketing Ethics , .

[10]  D. E. Blevins,et al.  Student perceptions of ‘job politics’ as practised by those climbing the corporate career ladder , 1984 .

[11]  Wallace A. Wood,et al.  Situational determinants of software piracy: An equity theory perspective , 1996 .

[12]  R. C. Rife.  Software piracy , 1994, Proceedings of NORTHCON '94.

[13]  Ram D. Gopal,et al.  International Software Piracy: Analysis of Key Issues and Impacts , 1998, Inf. Syst. Res..

[14]  Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa,et al.  Is Anybody Out There? Antecedents of Trust in Global Virtual Teams , 1998, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[15]  J. Piaget.  The Moral Judgment of the Child , 1932 .

[16]  Ram D. Gopal,et al.  Preventive and Deterrent Controls for Software Piracy , 1997, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[17]  Jung P. Shim,et al.  A Comparative Examination of Attitudes Toward Software Piracy Among Business Professors and Executives , 1993 .

[18]  Jin H. Im,et al.  Software piracy and software security measures in business schools , 1992, Inf. Manag..

[19]  L. Treviño.  Ethical Decision Making in Organizations: A Person-Situation Interactionist Model , 1986 .

[20]  Arturo Z. Vasquez-Parraga,et al.  Organizational Consequences, Marketing Ethics, and Salesforce Supervision: , 1993 .

[21]  Donald P. Robin,et al.  Toward the Development of a Multidimensional Scale for Improving Evaluations of Business Ethics , 1990 .

[22]  Karen D. Loch,et al.  Evaluating ethical decision making and computer use , 1996, CACM.

[23]  Detmar W. Straub,et al.  Key information liability issues facing managers: software piracy, proprietary databases, and indi , 1990 .

[24]  R. Sitgreaves.  Psychometric theory (2nd ed.). , 1979 .

[25]  S. Hunt,et al.  A General Theory of Marketing Ethics , 1986 .

[26]  Hsing Kenneth Cheng,et al.  Toward a profile of student software piraters , 1996 .

[27]  N. Herndon.  A new context for ethics education objectives in a college of business: Ethical decision-making models , 1996 .

[28]  L. Kohlberg,et al.  The psychology of moral development : the nature and validity of moral stages , 1984 .