Global Ethics Day 2026: When Professionals Stay Silent: Ethics Lessons from a Variety of Professions

Roger Boisjoly wrote a memo predicting the failure that destroyed Challenger six months before it happened. A co-pilot at Tenerife questioned the takeoff clearance once, gently, then let it drop. A Penn State graduate assistant reported what he saw to his supervisor and assumed someone else would call the police. Across more than a century, the same pattern repeats: competent, well-meaning people recognized something was wrong and said nothing, or said it too quietly to matter.

This discussion-based session examines ten case studies to uncover the forces behind that silence (institutional pressure, authority gradients, normalization of deviance, diffusion of responsibility, groupthink, and incremental compromise) and how those forces operate in accounting firms, finance departments, and client relationships. The session closes with six everyday workplace scenarios where the stakes are lower, the pressure is subtler, and the decision is genuinely harder.