Operations research and ethics: Responsibility, sharing and cooperation

After a discussion on the relevance of ethics in operations research, two approaches to the ethical discourse, one based on rules and the other based on princples and values, are analyzed. Then, two ethical principles, which can help OR researchers and practitioners in their activity are discussed in some detail. The first is the “responsibility principle”, proposed in a more general context by the philosopher Jonas, which in our case suggests to take into account in our work not only the point of view of the “client”, but also the point of view of all the “stakeholders”, i.e. the ones who can directly or indirectly be affected by the results of our activity. The second, which can be called the “sharing and cooperation principle”, calls for a more open distribution of the results of our research activity, whether they are ideas, algorithms or software.