After touching on moral absolutists vs. moral relativists over the past few weeks — in dealing with things like the war and when (or whether) it’s acceptible to do certain things like kill people.
Carlton Vogt who does the InfoWorld “Ethics Matters” column, has some thoughts on this subject where it relates to telling the truth on résumés. His questions are, how absolute a rule is that, and does anybody actually do it?
Most of us are encouraged to include on our résumés all our accomplishments, but none of us are ever advised to include details on our missteps and failures. But isn’t omitting those a form of deception because it gives an incomplete picture of our abilities? We may have completed a project that saved the company $5 million. We’d mention that in an instant, but we’d never mention that, in a moment of confusion, we recommended a software package that was dead on arrival. It would seem to me that hard-liners, who would never lie, would be compelled to be as honest as possible and mention both. Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Interesting reading, for that and other examples. And, perhaps, it has some lessons applicable to other such questions.