Business Ethics Case Study: Hacking Into Harvard

This case study paper will examine the Hacking Into Harvard Case where actions executed by college students jeopardized their potential opportunities to further their education at selected universities. The purpose of this study is to look at the moral issue that raises concern; which is whether the college students unauthorized actions should qualify as unethical behavior amongst the business schools or should the actions of the students be justified by shifting the blame of unethical behavior to the arms of the business schools and their third party application software.
In order to measure the morality of the college applicants who viewed their admission application results early I will use Utilitarianism and Kant moral theories in order to analyze the actions of the students from those two perspectives.
Hacking Into Harvard was were college applicants had the opportunity to hack into their

business school application file by accessing a link posted by a hacker on Businessweek Online. The curious college applicants accessed the link in hopes to review their admission results early to see if they were accepted into Harvard, Dartmouth, Duke, Carneige Mellon, MIT and Stanford business schools. All the following universities I just mentioned are not only well-known universities; but they also utilized the same application software provided by Apply Yourself, Inc. Apply Yourself Inc. was not aware of the following security threat which triggered the opportunity for the college applicants to obtain access to their business school application files in advance. The college applicants who decided to view their results were denied acceptance into Harvard Business School. Harvard found this action to be unethical and raised the concern that ethical behavior should have been deployed by college applicants when determining right from wrong in this situation. The other universities were supportive of Harvard’s decision and also denied majority of the college applicants who viewed their files. In result of Harvard’s decision college applicants began to defend themselves against the consequences handed out by the business schools by pointing out that their intentions were never malicious, while others argued they did not think reviewing the admission results would cause any potential harm.
The moral issue is that the students unauthorized actions qualified as unethical behavior amongst the business schools; versus the actions of the students being justified by placing the blame on the schools and Apply Yourself application software.

I will now analyze how the moral factors and considerations in regards to this case would have been justified under Utilitarianism and Kant.
Utilitarianism is the view of considering everyone’s benefit as equally important versus only considering my own. For any action, the morally correct thing to do is cause the greatest amount of happiness or pleasure or benefit for the greatest number possible; while at the same time causing the least amount of pain or unhappiness for the smallest number possible.
Kant believed that morality has to be something free and freely controlled by the person taking the moral action excluding consequences because consequences are not controllable. Morality is freely chosen and legislated universal law that any rational being could construct and all rational beings who want to be moral do

construct.