Ethics and Integrity.
● Dimensions of Ethics:
The following can be considered as the dimensions of ethics----
• First, ethical decisions can be made on the basis of one of several schools of ethics or ethical traditions — that is, sets of basic and necessarily quite general substantive principles.
• Second,
ethical decisions can be made at a variety of levels, ranging from the individual to the societal and even the trans-national.
• Third, ethical decisions can be made based on standards that are specific to a particular domain of human activity,
such as business or education.
■ Major Schools of Ethics : There are numerous schools of ethics, or ethical traditions. Some of them are as follows:
1) Utilitarianism :--- Utilitarianism holds that the ethically best decision, or in some variants of utilitarianism the best rule for making decisions, is the one that will produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Utilitarianism is the most familiar example of a general approach to ethics that is called consequentialist, because it judges the ethical acceptability of actions or policies based on their consequences. However, the approach taken to consequences can be much broader; the consequences that are considered to be of ethical importance can be environmental, social or even spiritual. It is important to be clear in any form of consequentialist argument about the values that define what counts as a benefit or as a harm. What is the greatest good, and how do we measure it? An influential variant of utilitarianism that is sometimes applied to public policy is cost-benefit analysis, which tries to identify the greatest good and ease the problem of comparing different people’s conceptions of the good (what philosophers call the problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility) by attaching dollar values to all the consequences of a particular policy choice; the preferred policy option is simply the one showing the highest ratio of benefits to costs.
----●2. Kantian:
Kantian or obligation-based ethics, named after the philosopher Immanuel Kant, with whom it is most closely associated, holds that the ethically acceptable decision is one that conforms to certain fundamental principles. For Kant, the most important of these principles was the “categorical imperative,” which has two formulations. In the first, to be ethically acceptable, one should conduct oneself according to principles that one could wish to see universally applied to everyone. In other words, before deciding to commit fraud or make promises we have no intention of keeping, we must ask whether it even makes sense to think about a society in which everyone acted as we propose to act. The second formulation requires that we avoid treating other people exclusively as means to an end, rather than as ends in themselves. Kantian ethics is the most familiar example of a more general category of ethics known as deontological ethics, whose key characteristic is that some actions are held to be inherently or intrinsically right or wrong — that is to say, right or wrong independent of their consequences.
A particularly influential form of Kantian argument is John Rawls’s attempt to define principles of distributive justice based on an intriguing application of the categorical imperative: asking how we would want the society to be organized if we had to make that choice from behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevented us from knowing in advance whether we were to be born rich or poor, male or female, athletic or physically disabled. Paradoxically, the Rawlsian approach to distributive justice shows that many Kantian ethical judgments cannot be easily isolated from consideration of their consequences.
-----●3. Rights-based:
Rights-based ethics, familiar because of Anglo-American legal systems’ recent emphasis on individual liberty and their much older tradition of the primacy of property rights, is organized around a set of claims (such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the ownership of private property) that individuals are presumed to have with respect to one another and to society. Rights-based ethics is embodied in the reference to “protection life and personal liberty” in the Fundamental Rights that is an integral part of the Indian Constitution.
The question “where do rights come from?” can be answered in different ways. Sometimes, as in the case of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, rights are held to be “self-evident”; at other times, they are justified with reference to more basic principles such as respect for persons, or to the idea of a contract among members of the society. In the latter respect rights-based and Kantian ethics overlap.
Contractarian The idea of a contract is central to what many philosophers regard as a distinct school of ethics:
-----■4. Contractarian ethics: which tries to derive principles of morality from the idea of a (hypothetical) contract entered into by members of a society. Implied consent to the terms of such a contract becomes the source of both rights and duties. Some variants of contractarian ethics have strongly Kantian elements: Rawls, for example, bases his analysis on the kind of contract individuals (actually, heads of households) would rationally enter into from behind the veil of ignorance. Both rights-based and contractarian ethics are characterized by what might be called intense individualism. In direct contrast, communitarian ethics, which is often defended partly with reference to limitations of the idea of rights, focusses less on individuals’ rights than on the importance to individual well-being and fulfilment of membership in a community. In the words of one of the leading contemporary communitarians, “if we are partly defined by the communities we inhabit, then we must also be implicated in the purposes and ends characteristic of those communities . . . the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity.”
It may be possible to define a middle ground between the intense individualism associated with the idea of a contract and the relative unconcern with the individual that is associated with many statements of communitarianism. At least one author has explored the idea of a covenant among individuals as the defining basis for moral obligations; unlike a contract, a covenant is not motivated primarily by considerations of selfinterest, and can include a notion of obligation arising from sources other than individual human will or consent. A rather awkward neologism covenantial ethics has been coined to describe this middle ground.
-----■5. Ethics of Care:
The ethics of care, which according to many accounts originated with psychologist Carol Gilligan’s efforts to describe women’s orientation to ethical decision making as “in a different voice,” resembles communitarian ethics in that rather than starting from a conception of human beings as isolated individuals, it emphasizes their relationships with one another. However, the ethics of care tend to be suspicious of claims about the welfare of the community, partly because such claims have often been used to justify women’s inferior status within a society. It is strongly egalitarian in its conception of how people ought to treat one another, and is especially sensitive to inequalities of power. At the same time, writers in this school or tradition emphasize the limitations of rights-based or contractual conceptions of an ethical point of view toward others, pointing out that in many situations just leaving people alone is not enough, and that in some relationships (like those between mothers and children) a strictly rights-based conceptions of respect for others make no sense.
As its description implies, character ethics, or the ethics of virtue, focusses on the character of those making ethical decisions. Virtuous people (that is, those who act according to such motives as generosity, compassion or fidelity to their obligations) are those most likely to make ethically acceptable decisions.
Ethical acceptability is thus determined at least in part by one’s motives for acting in a certain way, as well as by principles and consequences. Ethical acts are not necessarily those carried out by following rules, but from motives like doing good or fulfilling obligations. This formulation is especially attractive in situations where people are faced with a set of choices imposed by circumstances outside their control, all of which are ethically repugnant in different ways, or when the consequences of a particular action simply cannot be known. This school sometimes carries out ethical analysis starting with the premise that people have a right to fulfill their obligations to others, for instance, parents to decide for their young children on medical treatmen.
● Casuistry:
Casuistry is an ethical tradition or style holding that we are too concerned with principles. For the casuist, ethical decisions can be made only on a case-by-case basis, although the decisions made in previous cases can provide a source of wisdom to draw upon; indeed, ethical judgments can be made when there are no principles to draw upon, or when disagreement on principles is profound. An appropriate analogy may be with the operation of precedent in the legal system. Particularly in biomedical ethics, which often have to focus on individual cases in a clinical setting, there has recently been a revival of interest in casuistry as a response to what is viewed as excessive preoccupation with abstract principles in that field.
The preceding schools of ethics deal primarily with the relationships among human beings. Although many people are concerned about problems like pollution primarily because of their effects on human beings, it is also possible to argue that environmental ethics is now a distinct school of ethics, because many variants explicitly hold that human beings have duties and obligations not only to each other, but also to non-human beings and to the natural environment as a whole. One line of thought in environmental ethics, for instance, holds that preservation of “ecological integrity” is a principle that should take precedence over all others.
• First, ethical decisions can be made on the basis of one of several schools of ethics or ethical traditions — that is, sets of basic and necessarily quite general substantive principles.
• Second,
• Third, ethical decisions can be made based on standards that are specific to a particular domain of human activity,
■ Major Schools of Ethics : There are numerous schools of ethics, or ethical traditions. Some of them are as follows:
1) Utilitarianism :--- Utilitarianism holds that the ethically best decision, or in some variants of utilitarianism the best rule for making decisions, is the one that will produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Utilitarianism is the most familiar example of a general approach to ethics that is called consequentialist, because it judges the ethical acceptability of actions or policies based on their consequences. However, the approach taken to consequences can be much broader; the consequences that are considered to be of ethical importance can be environmental, social or even spiritual. It is important to be clear in any form of consequentialist argument about the values that define what counts as a benefit or as a harm. What is the greatest good, and how do we measure it? An influential variant of utilitarianism that is sometimes applied to public policy is cost-benefit analysis, which tries to identify the greatest good and ease the problem of comparing different people’s conceptions of the good (what philosophers call the problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility) by attaching dollar values to all the consequences of a particular policy choice; the preferred policy option is simply the one showing the highest ratio of benefits to costs.
----●2. Kantian:
Kantian or obligation-based ethics, named after the philosopher Immanuel Kant, with whom it is most closely associated, holds that the ethically acceptable decision is one that conforms to certain fundamental principles. For Kant, the most important of these principles was the “categorical imperative,” which has two formulations. In the first, to be ethically acceptable, one should conduct oneself according to principles that one could wish to see universally applied to everyone. In other words, before deciding to commit fraud or make promises we have no intention of keeping, we must ask whether it even makes sense to think about a society in which everyone acted as we propose to act. The second formulation requires that we avoid treating other people exclusively as means to an end, rather than as ends in themselves. Kantian ethics is the most familiar example of a more general category of ethics known as deontological ethics, whose key characteristic is that some actions are held to be inherently or intrinsically right or wrong — that is to say, right or wrong independent of their consequences.
A particularly influential form of Kantian argument is John Rawls’s attempt to define principles of distributive justice based on an intriguing application of the categorical imperative: asking how we would want the society to be organized if we had to make that choice from behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevented us from knowing in advance whether we were to be born rich or poor, male or female, athletic or physically disabled. Paradoxically, the Rawlsian approach to distributive justice shows that many Kantian ethical judgments cannot be easily isolated from consideration of their consequences.
-----●3. Rights-based:
Rights-based ethics, familiar because of Anglo-American legal systems’ recent emphasis on individual liberty and their much older tradition of the primacy of property rights, is organized around a set of claims (such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the ownership of private property) that individuals are presumed to have with respect to one another and to society. Rights-based ethics is embodied in the reference to “protection life and personal liberty” in the Fundamental Rights that is an integral part of the Indian Constitution.
The question “where do rights come from?” can be answered in different ways. Sometimes, as in the case of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, rights are held to be “self-evident”; at other times, they are justified with reference to more basic principles such as respect for persons, or to the idea of a contract among members of the society. In the latter respect rights-based and Kantian ethics overlap.
Contractarian The idea of a contract is central to what many philosophers regard as a distinct school of ethics:
-----■4. Contractarian ethics: which tries to derive principles of morality from the idea of a (hypothetical) contract entered into by members of a society. Implied consent to the terms of such a contract becomes the source of both rights and duties. Some variants of contractarian ethics have strongly Kantian elements: Rawls, for example, bases his analysis on the kind of contract individuals (actually, heads of households) would rationally enter into from behind the veil of ignorance. Both rights-based and contractarian ethics are characterized by what might be called intense individualism. In direct contrast, communitarian ethics, which is often defended partly with reference to limitations of the idea of rights, focusses less on individuals’ rights than on the importance to individual well-being and fulfilment of membership in a community. In the words of one of the leading contemporary communitarians, “if we are partly defined by the communities we inhabit, then we must also be implicated in the purposes and ends characteristic of those communities . . . the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity.”
It may be possible to define a middle ground between the intense individualism associated with the idea of a contract and the relative unconcern with the individual that is associated with many statements of communitarianism. At least one author has explored the idea of a covenant among individuals as the defining basis for moral obligations; unlike a contract, a covenant is not motivated primarily by considerations of selfinterest, and can include a notion of obligation arising from sources other than individual human will or consent. A rather awkward neologism covenantial ethics has been coined to describe this middle ground.
-----■5. Ethics of Care:
The ethics of care, which according to many accounts originated with psychologist Carol Gilligan’s efforts to describe women’s orientation to ethical decision making as “in a different voice,” resembles communitarian ethics in that rather than starting from a conception of human beings as isolated individuals, it emphasizes their relationships with one another. However, the ethics of care tend to be suspicious of claims about the welfare of the community, partly because such claims have often been used to justify women’s inferior status within a society. It is strongly egalitarian in its conception of how people ought to treat one another, and is especially sensitive to inequalities of power. At the same time, writers in this school or tradition emphasize the limitations of rights-based or contractual conceptions of an ethical point of view toward others, pointing out that in many situations just leaving people alone is not enough, and that in some relationships (like those between mothers and children) a strictly rights-based conceptions of respect for others make no sense.
As its description implies, character ethics, or the ethics of virtue, focusses on the character of those making ethical decisions. Virtuous people (that is, those who act according to such motives as generosity, compassion or fidelity to their obligations) are those most likely to make ethically acceptable decisions.
Ethical acceptability is thus determined at least in part by one’s motives for acting in a certain way, as well as by principles and consequences. Ethical acts are not necessarily those carried out by following rules, but from motives like doing good or fulfilling obligations. This formulation is especially attractive in situations where people are faced with a set of choices imposed by circumstances outside their control, all of which are ethically repugnant in different ways, or when the consequences of a particular action simply cannot be known. This school sometimes carries out ethical analysis starting with the premise that people have a right to fulfill their obligations to others, for instance, parents to decide for their young children on medical treatmen.
● Casuistry:
Casuistry is an ethical tradition or style holding that we are too concerned with principles. For the casuist, ethical decisions can be made only on a case-by-case basis, although the decisions made in previous cases can provide a source of wisdom to draw upon; indeed, ethical judgments can be made when there are no principles to draw upon, or when disagreement on principles is profound. An appropriate analogy may be with the operation of precedent in the legal system. Particularly in biomedical ethics, which often have to focus on individual cases in a clinical setting, there has recently been a revival of interest in casuistry as a response to what is viewed as excessive preoccupation with abstract principles in that field.
The preceding schools of ethics deal primarily with the relationships among human beings. Although many people are concerned about problems like pollution primarily because of their effects on human beings, it is also possible to argue that environmental ethics is now a distinct school of ethics, because many variants explicitly hold that human beings have duties and obligations not only to each other, but also to non-human beings and to the natural environment as a whole. One line of thought in environmental ethics, for instance, holds that preservation of “ecological integrity” is a principle that should take precedence over all others.
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