Speaker: Professor David Comerford

Title: Dilemmas of Informing vs. Not Informing People That They Have Been Wronged: A Welfare Approach Applied to the Case of Falsified Birth Certificates

Abstract: In 2018, it came to light that people (now aged 50-70) had had their birth certificates falsified so that adoptive parents were listed as birth parents. Immediately, policy makers announced that the individuals concerned had a “right to know”. Here we consider the welfare implications of that decision. We conducted a survey (n = 393), in which we experimentally varied how we asked respondents their views on whether to inform victims. Initially, results indicated a strong consensus favouring informing. However, a test-retest measure shows that endorsement of informing reduced in magnitude over the course of the 10-minute survey, which is best explained as a preference learning effect. This study highlights an important and growing class of ethical dilemmas faced by firms and organizations. It is the first work we are aware of that offers a generally applicable methodology for discerning an ethical course of action when an organization has to decide whether to inform victims who are oblivious to the wrongdoing inflicted on them e.g. cases of data breaches; medical malpractice.