How Important Is Morality In An Online Business?

The running of an online business is not the most obvious circumstance to cause a crisis of conscience. Most website owners would not hesitate to say that they consider they conduct business in an ethical manner. Employing ethical business standards is one of the ways to build up a good reputation with customers and fellow webmasters. To some extent being honest and ethical in your dealings is matter of self-preservation; if you become known as an untrustworthy person, your customers will not make a habit of returning to do business with you, and this means your business won't be successful. Your reputation (and this is so in any business) is one of your most valuable assets, but morality is about more than conducting yourself in a certain way when your behaviour is being observed and relaxing your code of conduct when there are no witnesses. Morality is about doing the right thing when nobody else will ever know, and the Internet offers the ideal place for underhand dealings to go undetected if you want to live a double-life.

My crisis of conscience happened recently when I was tempted to promote a program that, whilst not exactly a scam, is not 100% squeaky clean. I became interested in this program when it was launched because it looked like an excellent way to make money working online. Upon closer examination I found a couple of flaws in the program: one was that the sales page is incomplete if you are feeling charitable, and misleading if you are not. An even bigger flaw is that there is an inbuilt possibility that anyone using the program would lose money. I did not want to be responsible for anyone losing money, so I decided not to have anything to do with that program.

Then I started to see advertisements for the program and I thought about all the people who were promoting it and making a lot of money. Was I being silly to worry and, as a consequence, missing out on a good money-making opportunity? Would it be an immoral act for me to promote the program? After all, I'm not everyone's guardian, people are responsible for their own actions, and I would just be presenting something for their consideration. Today I was getting to the point where I might have managed to persuade myself that promoting that program anonymously was a good idea and not promoting it was wasting an opportunity to make some easy cash quickly. I am not rich, just an ordinary working person and making some easy cash is an attractive idea. What was holding me back? Conscience, pure and simple and I was working towards overruling with that. Today I heard something which made me realise that I had to listen to my conscience.

Today happens to be the Internet Watch Foundation's Awareness Day. The first words I heard spoken this morning were part of the news on the radio. It was a report about child abuse websites and the way the abuse is getting nastier and the childen are getting younger. According the IWF seven child abuse websites are reported every single day. If seven are reported, how many are going undetected? Who runs these evil websites? Evil people presumably, but I wonder if some of the webmasters started out as ordinary working people who just couldn't resist a chance to make some easy money.




technorati tags: Internet Business
Money Making
Conscience
Ethical Business Dealings
Morality