Ethics, Personal Values, and Influences

• Ethics is a philosophy branch concerning moral considerations, interpreted subjectively.

Personal Values System

• It is a set of beliefs held by individuals.
• Influences include religion, socioeconomic conditions, and family/friends.
• Geographic location, cultural, and heritage traditions also have an impact.
• Ethics are guided by society and are a series of systematic beleifs.
• Conscience relates to thoughts about one's beliefs and actions.

Early Influences on Ethics

• Socrates and Confucius are the two main philosopher.
• Confucius was born in 552 BC in Lu, China.
• He divorced his wife for his studies and held a service for his mom after her mom died.
• Confucius confined himself to seclusion for 3 years after mother's death, began teaching.
• His followers were considered pillars of the community and wielded great influence.
• Confucius writings began the Ju movement and was not revered until after his death in 479 BC.
• Socrates was born in Athens, Greece, in 470 BC and known as the Father of Democracy.
• Socrates' teaching centered on inductive reasoning, critical thinking from specific details to generalities.
• He taught by asking questions which became known as the Socratic method.

Major Areas of Ethical Philosophy

• Influenced by life experiences, education, and people around.
• Meta-ethics is understanding the nature of ethics and the source.
• It is the ethics of ethics.
• Meta means beyond in Greek.
• Normative ethics involves the standards by which right and wrong are determined.
• Golden Rule is an example of normative ethics.
• The three strategies within normative ethics are virtue-based, consequential, and duty-based.

Virtue-Based Ethics

• It is the individual's choice of values (virtues), with decisions based on the corresponding value systems.
• Stems from the teaching of Plato, students of Socrates.
• Wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice are particularly important.

Consequential Approach

• Judged as intrinsically good or bad, based on what will bring the best balance of good outcomes over bad.
• Utilitarian-based ethics suggests decisions should be based on the choice that is best for the majority.
• This includes being unbiased and not considering personal interests ahead of others.
• The greater good means the solution that would best serve the most people.

Duty-Based Ethics (Deontology/Rights-Based Ethics)

• Maintains that certain life obligations should be of primary focus.
• These obligations should take priority over other considerations.
• This means that an individual's rights are most important.
• Deontologists believe violating individual rights for the sake of a better situation for more people is wrong.
• The greater good is not considered because it weakens individual rights.

Applied Ethics

• Calls for investigation of any given debate over a morally based issue with two aspects:
  • The issue is controversial.
  • It is clearly classified as a moral issue.

Ethical Decision Making

• Decision-making is important because it could be a matter of life or death/health.

Three-Step Ethical Decision-Making Model

• It was created by Kenneth Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale in their book The Power of Ethical Management.
  • Is it legal?
  • Is it balanced?
  • How does it make me feel?
• A law is a rule set by a group to serve as boundaries of expected behavior with a result in penalties if broken.
• If its not legal then there is no need to go further in the Three-Step Model.
• Balance is important to the well-rounded individual.
• Feelings guide you mentally and physically.