2005, John Ellsworth, Father of Deceased Soldier Essay

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2005, John Ellsworth, father of deceased soldier Justin Ellsworth, made national news when he asked to be granted access to his deceased son's e-mails. Twenty-year-old Justin had been killed in Fallujah on November 13, 2004, by a roadside bomb. The least, Mr. Ellsworth could do, the father felt, was to collect these e-mails that his son had written whilst in Iraq and fashion them into some sort of memorial. Yahoo! refused. They had promised privacy to their clients and they could not break the promise regardless of the situation. It was only after a Michigan probate court ordered them to release the e-mails that Yahoo complied.

The case reveals two types of ethics. Yahoo! On the one hand epitomized the deontological way of thinking that norms of right and wrong exist and cannot be breached regardless of the situation. The judge, however, took the family's happiness into account and, by so doing, manifested a Utilitarian code of ethics.

The case made ripples, and as it did so people took sides. Interestingly enough, the sides that people took invariably reflected their religious and political affiliations.

The Christian Science monitor, for instance, seemed to incline towards Yahoo! It quoted sources commending Yahoo! For their act.

Many bloggers were horrified.

"We thought we had absolute privacy and now we have learned that after our death, a family member could possibly wrangle access to [our] personal space," one blogger lamented on drudge.com.

"If the soldier had wanted his family to read his e-mail, then he would have CC'd or BCC'd them," another wrote. (Leach, 2005)

The Monitor also quoted legal experts, such as Gerald Ferrera, executive director of the Cyberlaw Center at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. who opined that "I would hope that the Yahoo! position here would become a trade practice - that e-mail would only be released if a judge approved it," (Leach, 2005)

The deontological approach questions what is the best thing to do, namely what is right or wrong in this situation.

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Examples of this approach would be the Biblical Law or Kantian moral theory which are both different to utilitarianism in that they do not depend on end-results -- namely happiness -- for practice, but rather exist as an imperative namely, that they applies to all situations regardless of the end result. What you do in one situation, you should always do regardless of the particular situation. In other words, a person should never kill regardless of situation. The ethics must be unconditional (with no exceptions) and it must be universal (applicable to all beings). According to the deontological, Yahoo would have been in the right since Yahoo had set for itself certain principles; it had publicized these principles, and had promised its clients that it would not publish their e-mails. The deontological ethics sets for itself clear ways of right and wrong and, rarely, if ever breaks these.

The Utilitarian coda, on the other hand, would have considered how many people would have been made happiest by Yahoo allowing the family access to the e-mails. This is hard to say since Justin's e-mails may have caused more suffering than joy depending on the content of the e-mails. An instance that Henry Perritt, dean of Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology point out is that "You might have a situation where someone is carrying on an affair and doesn't want his family to….....

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