Ethical Issues In Government

In order to solve this moral and ethical problem, we need to first look at the study from the perspective of the US government. The US government has many roles and responsibilities that it must carry out in its operations. There are three branches of the US government (Trumanlibrary). These are the Legislative (Senate and House of Representatives), Judicial (Supreme Court and lower courts), and the Executive branch which is lead by the president. The government is essentially responsible for running the country either directly or indirectly through the enforcement of policies which come in the form of laws. The US government for the most part could be said that it operates on a few ethical principles. One of these principles is based …show more content…
If we go off of this idea, the US government should be doing what is in the best interests for its people. The people who created the policies and laws, the Legislative branch of the government, are responsible for making those lawn helpful to the country as a whole and should not favor one group over another. We also need to look at the idea of consequentialism. The policies that they make are supposed to help more people and make lawn that do not hurt people in the process (Tavani). If we look at what Snowden did from the perspective of the US government, what he did was partially permissible because it freed information to people in the hopes of helping the citizens, but at the same time, it was not permissible because it put countless lives at risk, and by definition, he committed a crime. The government does not typically see events in any way other that illegal vs. legal, and what Edward Snowden did was definitely illegal by law. In fact, the US military said in a report that because of the information that was leaked, Snowden cause billions of dollars of damage to its security infrastructures. In addition to that, the House Intelligence Committee released a document summarizing a report that detailed its two year investigation about Snowden and everything …show more content…
The National Security Agency operates under the idea that what they are doing is a benefit to the United States, and its citizens. It performs operations on a daily basis ranging from surveillance to intelligence interception and decryption of enemy combatant communication, to evidently domestic intelligence gathering. The NSA does not operate without direction from the US government, so in a part, it shares many of the same ideals as the government (Burns). The NSA might look at the ideals of consequentialism. The think that the practices that they do, whether or not they are directly focused on helping or in turn will help the american people, will hurt far fewer people that it is helping. They are also using the idea of act deontology (Tavani). This means, that they think that they are doing the right thing by committing whatever act they may be doing. They think that they are helping people. Does this mean that through domestic spying that they found and stopped more than one attack from occurring, potentially saving dozens if not hundreds or more lives? Probably. They have the idea that what they are doing is helping the population. They are also using Act Utilitarianism, meaning that something is morally permissible if some of the consequences of doing so provides the greatest number of good for the greatest number of people affected by it. They use this to justify the domestic spying saying