Good editorial, Steve. I noticed the following statement...

"On one hand I can understand that ethics and morals are becoming more important."

Heh... when were they ever not the most important thing to good people? All I could think of was that ethics and morals should always be the most important and if everyone else thought so, the world wouldn't be going through the current economic crisis that it is. For example, who's brilliant idea was it to give sub-prime ARM mortgages to people who couldn't afford to make regular mortgage payments on houses they wouldn't have been able to afford to begin with? They just had to know how much trouble people were going to get into, yet, they did it anyway because it was initially good for profits. Now, those same profits are making flushing sounds.

Of course, the people who got the sub-prime ARM mortgages were also greedy which, I suppose, is a form of being unethical...

Same goes for IT... Ethics should always be prime in IT... I would much rather have someone come to me and say they made a mistake than to just hide it or ignore it. I'll never kill the messenger... well, unless it's the 3rd or 4th time they screwed up after showing them how to avoid the screwup. 😉 Ethics without responsibility is just about useless.