If our ethical decision-making is not solely based on feelings, religion, law, accepted social practice, or science, then on what basis can we decide between right and wrong, good and bad? Many philosophers, ethicists, and theologians have helped us answer this critical question. They have suggested a variety of different lenses that help us perceive ethical dimensions. Here are six of them:
ethical thinking essay
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Care ethics is rooted in relationships and in the need to listen and respond to individuals in their specific circumstances, rather than merely following rules or calculating utility. It privileges the flourishing of embodied individuals in their relationships and values interdependence, not just independence. It relies on empathy to gain a deep appreciation of the interest, feelings, and viewpoints of each stakeholder, employing care, kindness, compassion, generosity, and a concern for others to resolve ethical conflicts. Care ethics holds that options for resolution must account for the relationships, concerns, and feelings of all stakeholders. Focusing on connecting intimate interpersonal duties to societal duties, an ethics of care might counsel, for example, a more holistic approach to public health policy that considers food security, transportation access, fair wages, housing support, and environmental protection alongside physical health.
Making good ethical decisions requires a trained sensitivity to ethical issues and a practiced method for exploring the ethical aspects of a decision and weighing the considerations that should impact our choice of a course of action. Having a method for ethical decision-making is essential. When practiced regularly, the method becomes so familiar that we work through it automatically without consulting the specific steps.
The more novel and difficult the ethical choice we face, the more we need to rely on discussion and dialogue with others about the dilemma. Only by careful exploration of the problem, aided by the insights and different perspectives of others, can we make good ethical choices in such situations.
This framework for thinking ethically is the product of dialogue and debate at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Primary contributors include Manuel Velasquez, Dennis Moberg, Michael J. Meyer, Thomas Shanks, Margaret R. McLean, David DeCosse, Claire André, Kirk O. Hanson, Irina Raicu, and Jonathan Kwan. It was last revised on November 5, 2021.
One can have a degree in business, medicine, law, psychology, or education, and be familiar with the knowledge base of the profession, but nevertheless act in an unethical manner that undermines the utility of that knowledge. For example, if one looks at four huge and widely publicized business failures by CEOs (Kenneth Lay at Enron, Bernard Ebbers at Worldcom, Conrad Black at Hollinger International, Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco), all were related to ethics (2). Some of the CEOs took their business down with them. Then there are the huge scientific frauds, such as that of experimental psychologist Diederick Stapel, who simply made up his data (3), and even frauds in education, including Corinthian Colleges (4), which deceived students regarding graduation and job-placement rates. There are even severe ethical violations in the ministry, as shown by the denials and cover-ups of child-abuse that have made headlines over the years (5). Much of this ethically-compromised behavior starts early, when students are in school. In one survey, 86% of high school students agreed that students cheat at some point in their high-school careers (6). Great professionals, citizens, and leaders in any field of endeavor are ethical people (7). They need to learn to reason ethically before they go out in the work force and start influencing and even controlling the fate of others (8).
Ethical reasoning is how to think about issues of right or wrong. Processes of reasoning can be taught, and the college or university is an appropriate place to teach these processes because so often it is taught no place else, and because it is essential for a successful adulthood. Although parents and especially religious institutions may teach ethics, they do not always teach ethical reasoning. Academic courses are the logical place to teach the cognitive process of reasoning especially as ethical issues relate to the content of a particular discipline. No matter how knowledgeable one is about their profession, if the knowledge is not backed by ethical reasoning, long-term success in the career is likely to be severely compromised.
Can ethical reasoning actually be taught with any success? Apparently so. Richard Paul (9), of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, devised a program whereby principles of critical thinking were applied specifically to teaching ethical reasoning to young people Robert DeHaan and colleagues at Emory University successfully taught ethical reasoning to high school students (10). Catherine Myser of the University of Newcastle and her colleagues have successfully taught ethics to medical students (11). And James Weber of Marquette University found that teaching ethical awareness and reasoning to business-school students can help their ethical reasoning, although the improvements are not always long-term (12).
Ethical reasoning is hard because there are so many ways to fail. Ethical behavior is far harder to display than one would expect simply on the basis of what we learn from our parents, from school, and from our religious training (13). To intervene, individuals must go through a series of steps, and unless all of the steps are completed, they are not likely to behave in an ethical way, regardless of the amount of training they have received in ethics, and regardless of their levels of other types of skills.
How does one actually teach ethical reasoning in the classroom? The most effective way to teach ethical reasoning is through the case-study method, but it is important that students generate their own case studies from their own experience as well, and then apply the steps of the model to their own problems. They need to be actively involved in seeing how the steps of the model apply to their own individual problems.
Through grappling with these kinds of issues through case studies, students apply ethical principles and ethical reasoning. If students are not explicitly given these kinds of ethical dilemmas to confront, they will not learn to apply process of ethical reasoning. You would not just tell algebra students about a formula for solving some mathematical question, and then move on to the next topic. You would get them to apply, to use, that formula to solve multiple problems to ensure they understand it and can use it. Likewise, it is the process of applying ethical reasoning that is the primary outcome here. Because of this, the conclusions students come to are often less important than their reasoning processes in coming to those conclusions.
There are no easy answers to any of these problems, but that is the point: Teaching ethical reasoning is not about teaching what one should do in particular circumstances, it is about teaching students how wisely to make very difficult decisions involving ethical considerations where the answers are anything but clear cut. Students need actively to discuss problems, possible solutions, and the advantages and disadvantages of these potential solutions. Then they have to decide how they would act.
Teaching ethical reasoning online presents its own particular challenges. Learning how to reason ethically is a dialectical, back-and-forth process. Simply delivering content through lectures and readings are at best supplementary forms of instruction. The primary form of instruction needs to be interactive because students need to present ideas, get feedback on those ideas, and then try out re-formed ideas that themselves will be subject to further modification. So because learning ethical reasoning requires active, not passive learning (16), particular care must be given to ensuring that online courses are designed with opportunities for rich interaction between students as well as between students and instructors. Discussion boards appear to be the most common way of achieving these interactions, but doing so requires particular attention to certain dynamics:
Use ethical dilemmas that address those issues that are more applicable to your particular discipline and address the ethical codes of behavior most salient in your discipline (see the list of resources below for discipline-specific ideas). When using discipline codes of ethics, you should ask three questions:
In assessing quality of ethical reasoning, the key principle for instructors to remember is that you should score for quality of reasoning, not for agreement with the conclusions the student reaches. We tend to like people who are similar to, and who agree with us (17, 18), which can introduce bias into grading. So as teachers, we have to be scrupulous to make sure we are grading for quality of reasoning, not for agreement with our set of values or perspectives. What matters is how well students reason, not the exact content of what they say.
When students have written essays showing their ethical reasoning, there are some general attributes of the essays to look for, and some specific attributes as well. The general attributes are those that would apply to essays of almost any kind including how logical, coherent, organized, and persuasive the essay is. The specific attributes are relevant in particular to ethical reasoning.
The sample essay above is a strong one, because it presents four alternative solutions as well as a fifth that is recognized as unethical, and it considers both the advantages and disadvantages of each potential solution.
Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies themoral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moralstatus of, the environment and its non-human contents. This entrycovers: (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to theanthropocentrism (i.e., human-centeredness) embedded in traditionalwestern ethical thinking; (2) the development of the discipline fromthe 1960s and 1970s; (3) the connection of deep ecology, feministenvironmental ethics, animism and social ecology to politics; (4) theattempt to apply traditional ethical theories, includingconsequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to supportcontemporary environmental concerns; (5) the broader concerns of somethinkers with wilderness, the built environment and the politics ofpoverty; and (6) the ethics of sustainability and climate change. 2ff7e9595c
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