Ethical Decision Making

In my opinion, understanding of ethics and implementation of ethical principles is generally communicated badly to most students.

Ethics is historically rooted in the works and ideas of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Immanuel Kant. It was Immanuel Kant that talks about the "greater good" as the principle agent to which ethics serves. This is seldom properly communicated to students.

Here is a brief viewpoint about Ethics and Ethical Decision Making:

• Locke believed that "men" are usually true to their word and fulfill their obligations and that conflicts can be resolved in a peaceful manner: This would seem to provide a good foundation for ethical behavior.
  
  
• Hobbes believes that "men" constantly live in fear that that life of a man is poor, brutal, short and nasty and the actions of men are essentially evil all of the time as they are selfish, brutal, assholes. This would seem to say that "men" can never be ethical.

While these are polar opposites, the true state of collective humanity remains unknown. Are humans intrinsially ethical or not?

But regardless, we can outline a procedure for how to make an ethical decision. This procedure is almost never done.

1. Reflective Thinking: this illuminates options and personal biases but this takes time
2. Clarify Goals: Is the goal of the decision to meet the "greater good" or is it to meet some other ethical standard?
3. Become informed by data
4. Develop option space based on being informed by data
5. Consider the consequences (and unintended consequences) of a particular choices. This is where values (and empathy) come into play. This is where your gut instinct should be overruled by reflective thinking and the data, and then critical thinking folds the greater good into this.
6. Make a choice
7. Monitor the "system behavior" after you have made this choice. Don't assume that this process stops at step 6. Most likely the feedback from the system and its now changed behavior will require modifications of your choice - particularly if the unintended consequences outweigh your intent.

The Ethical Lens is then the view that is based on a) relective thinking and b) full consideration of unintended consequences.

This lens should really be applied to all the topics under consideration to decide if there indeed are ethical issues associated with these topics. Indeed this is one of the challenges; many scientists have argued that not much belongs in the ethical domain. While ultimately that is your own decision to make, you should not make these decisions in a vacuum of knowledge about the wide range of issues that do merit ethical consideration. After that, then you can choose to ignore it.