LO7: Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
An interesting statement came up during one of our student voice(SV) sessions and it made me think about some of the ethical implications surrounding such an idea. Our SV group has just started to plan out an event we have held every year: an event where we get our students from each cohort to donate goods that can be of help to our local and college service groups. As SV members as well as being the very audience of the event itself, our discussions revolved around how we could achieve to gain as many participants in this event this year. This was when we started discussing about holding a competition or a reward-based system to help motivate and bring active participation into the event. Perhaps there may be nothing wrong with such a suggestion but there is definitely a conflict between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. However, the reality is that these ideas are without a doubt going to increase participation in our event and hence I believe there is an ethical conflict. We could definitely also just implement punish-based competition if we wanted to drastically increase participation as students are more likely to view a loss greater than an equivalent gain – the loss aversion effect. In a nutshell, I believe the question lies with whether the ends justify the means. Personally, I believe the context heavily matters and different people will have different opinions of the matter. If our goal was to simply just raise products for our services, then I don’t think it really matters whether we use intrinsic or extrinsic motivation as a way to involve students. However, if the event’s aim were to place importance on the intent behind donating the goods, then, of course, intrinsic motivation is very necessary for this process, rather fundamental.