Considerations in ethical decision-making and software piracy

Individuals are faced with the many opportunities to pirate. The decision t o pirate or not may be related to an individual's attitudes toward other et hical issues. A person's ethical and moral predispositions and the judgment s that they use to make decisions may be consistent across various ethical dilemmas and may indicate their likelihood to pirate software. This paper i nvestigates the relationship between religion and a theoretical ethical dec ision making process that an individual uses when evaluating ethical or une thical situations. An ethical decision making model was studied for general unethical scenarios and for the unethical behavior of software piracy. The research model was tested via path analysis using structural equation mode ling and was found to be appropriate for the sample data. The results sugge st that there is a relationship between religion and the stages of an ethic al decision making process regarding general ethical situations and softwar e piracy.