An ethical dilemma that I personally faced at one point in my life happened last year. This problem was related to my work situation at the time. I spent a short while employed at a small telemarketing firm. My work environment was essentially an out bound call center where we used Internet telephony and the publicly available telephone number lists in many geographical localities to market products, usually advertising space on a young Web site. We had to assume false names and, while official policy pointed out that whenever the call recipients at a household or business we called asked to be stricken off our list, they had to be, with no more calls being made to their number. Yet apparently, sometimes when I would call a number, the call recipient(s) would complain that this was the sixth or seventh call they had received from our call center. Asking to be stricken off the list, evidently was not respected. I personally saw some coworkers simply entering the "Call later" code for people's numbers instead of the "Remove from list" code when these people had specifically asked for it. Some people even called their local police departments to report persistent prank callers (though such claims were not taken seriously) or tried to track the numbers we were calling them from, unsuccessfully (since we used Voice over Internet Protocol). I began to see that the job was a genuine nuisance to many, if not most, of the people we called, because very few sales were made; what we were selling was something that very few potential customers were interested in, and yet we were inconveniencing many people and wasting their valuable time and arguably invading their privacy; especially in terms of a business, I could understand the anger of small business owners receiving calls they hoped were sales calls, instead trying to convince them of ways to part with what little money they had.

I would go to our team management and report abuses of our official policy on removing numbers from the list. However, I was not taken seriously. At times I would attempt to apologize to angered call recipients, but this was difficult because it was poor "salesmanship" and as a new hire much of what I could say was limited to a script. In only one case, I even tried to explain to a particularly angry call recipient how the situation was at the call center, and why some call recipients kept getting called (but I kept this as professional as possible). However, since all our calls were recorded for quality assurance, all this netted me was a meeting with the team manager. In the end, I did not resolve the problem exactly, but I left the job.

I feel that the ethical framework I used in my decision making process was character ethics. I believed I was genuinely inconveniencing and troubling people and I did not enjoy it at all. I tried to put myself in the place of a small business owner sitting at a desk waiting for the sales call that could potentially give them their livelihood or get the wheels of their firm going, instead getting call after call from telemarketers. I believe that this was character ethics because it sincerely bothered me more than it did my coworkers; my coworkers did not complain, did not attempt to enforce official policy, and approached this only as a job. My values were different, and I demonstrated a lack of hypocrisy about them.

I believe that if I had to make the choice again, this would be somewhat situational. The deontological argument could be that the calls broke rules (official company policy, privacy laws, statutes to combat telephone harassment) so I could have used this too, but it was not really my logic. The consequentalist argument would be that the telemarketer's actions in this situation led to unhappiness and helplessness from strangers who did nothing to be put in this situation, but it would also be the telemarketer's personal unemployment if they decided to continually object to the work. If the job had been out of economic necessity instead of to gain work experience I would probably have taken the personal consequentalist approach, i.e. avoided my own unemployment. Otherwise I believe I would still have selected character ethics, because I am not comfortable in a work situation where I feel I hurt the customer.