Ethical Decisions ? How do we make the right ones?
CSS 330?Critical Thinking and Logic
Charles Bocage
12 April 2004
Ethical Decisions ? How do we make the right ones?
What does it mean to be ethical? Or, what does it mean to make an ethical decision? These two questions can be hard to answer. Many people tend to associate ethics with a feeling. Things people do that feel right must be ethical, right?. Things people feel bad for doing must be ethically wrong. People, though, can act on a feeling even if it is right or wrong. Other people may associate ethics with law. Laws are usually based on ethical beliefs or standards. But like feelings, these standards are not always correct. The United States slavery laws of the early 1800's, for example. While they were laws passed by the government, they were not ethical correct. Other people may conjoin religion and ethics. While religion promotes an ethical way of life, it still related to religious beliefs or believers. Meaning, ethics is not just limited to an individual who has religious beliefs opposed to one who does not. Still yet, other people may believe that ethics are based on whatever society says is right or wrong. This is not always the case as well. Nazi Germany for example, was ethically and morally wrong. The Germany society as a whole was brainwashed in believing it was morally and ethically okay or the right to commit ethnic cleansing of the Jews ("What is Ethics?" 2004).
If all these ideas of ethics and ethical decisions are not correct, what really is ethics then? Sociologist Raymond Baumhart defines ethics as:
well based standards of right and wrong that pre ...