Decision+Making

Ethical Decision Making Ethical decisions are something important that every person will have to go through in there life. Same as in the work place. First off, you have to understand the ethics is not the same as feelings, though feelings do provide important information that can be applied to our ethical decisions. But, what do we base our ethical choices off of? Ethics should not be based off of feelings, religion, law (though it sometimes may apply), accepted social practice, or science. Instead, there are three different sources of ethical standards we should use. **The Utilitarian Approach** These choices are based off of the idea that the ethical actions used should be the ones that do the most good while doing the least amount of harm. To put it in better terms, produces the greatest balance of good over harm. **The Rights Approach** This approach suggests that the best action is the one that best protects and respects the moral rights of those affected. This stems from the idea that they have a right to be treated as ends and not merely as means to other ends. The list of moral rights -including the rights to make one's own choices about what kind of life to lead, to be told the truth, not to be injured, to a degree of privacy, and so on-is widely debated; some now argue that non-humans have rights, too.

This is a very old way of approaching ethics. It uses the virtues of honesty, courage, compassion, generosity, tolerance, love, fidelity, integrity, fairness, self-control. Virtue ethics asks of any action, "What kind of person will I become if I do this?" or "Is this action consistent with my acting at my best?" This is one many people with a certain degree of power use to still look appealing.
 * The Virtue Approach**