Final answer:
Conducting a comprehensive information gathering phase before drafting ethics policies is important to tailor the policies to the specific organization's needs. It helps to identify pitfalls to avoid, gather evidence for ethical beliefs, and unearth best practices from peer organizations.
Step-by-step explanation:
The reason to engage in a comprehensive information gathering phase before drafting your internal and external ethics policies is to ensure that you develop policies that are tailored to your specific organization's needs and values. While it may seem easier to copy existing ethics policies from other organizations (option 1), this approach may not address the unique ethical challenges and considerations of your organization. Instead, engaging in extensive information gathering allows you to:
- Identify ethical pitfalls to avoid: By researching and examining examples of ethical issues and controversies faced by other organizations, you can learn from their mistakes and develop policies that address those pitfalls (option 2).
- Collect reaffirming evidence for your own ethical beliefs: Researching ethical practices and perspectives from different sources can help strengthen your understanding of your organization's ethical values and provide evidence to support those beliefs (option 3 is not a valid reason).
- Unearth best practices from peers in the industry: By gathering information on how other organizations approach ethics, you can identify and adopt best practices that are relevant to your own organization, improving the effectiveness of your ethics policies (option 4).