Well, who put themselves in that situation? Variable. My first job out of school was at an MDC (medium-sized dumb company) where, 3 months in, there was a mana

Well, who put themselves in that situation? Variable. My first job out of school was at an MDC (medium-sized dumb company) where, 3 months in, there was a management change. The new middle-manager began sabotaging the best people-- taking them off their coding projects and putting them on non-coding office work-- in order to bore them out of the company, thus eliminating the people he saw as threats to his position in the future. The 3 best new hires were laid off within 6 months of this happening, myself for the "crime" of seeking employment elsewhere, one for refusing a "promotion" into an ethically dubious role, and one for reasons too complicated to get into, and all of this was through no fault of their own. Luckily, this was during a great economy, and all 3 of us got better jobs within a few weeks. No one is required to remain in such a humiliating position. What if the company says they will give negative references if he doesn't train the replacements? Is this not coercion? This is an unusual case, but it's not entirely uncommon. In the pharmaceutical industry, there've been M&A cases where people kept on at the acquired company were forbidden from giving references for their laid-off colleagues. In BDCs, this sort of political sleaze occurs more often than you'd think. Again, I'm assuming that you're "spoiled" by startups and technology companies, where one's career progress has a high correlation to the quality of one's work, and wherein internal political sleaze is exceedingly rare. You've missed the point. Ethics that fluctuate with one's career situation aren't ethics to begin with either. I don't know why "situational ethics" get such a negative review, when all ethics are situational, the situation including the consequences of each option. For example, it's unethical to steal, right? On the other hand, some people must steal in order to avoid starvation, and it's arguably much worse, from an ethical standpoint, to submit oneself to pointless and preventable death. Ethics is about pursuing the morally best option among those that are actually available, and which choice is best depends on the consequences (to oneself, and to others) of each, i.e. the situation.