Beginning Points

Takeaways
  • Ethics recognizes that you always have choices.
  • Ethics is synonymous with the attempt to answer questions about how you should act and who you should be.
  • Ethical deliberation is inescapable for anyone who cares about anything.
  • All human institutions, including families, workplaces and even friendships, embody codes of ethics.

What is Ethics?

Ethics is the study and evaluation of human conduct and character.

  • The study involves describing the values or principles of different individuals and groups.
  • The evaluation explores why people embrace different values and principles.
Noticing that there are conflicts between differing values and principles leads naturally to questions such as:
  • Which values and principles should people embrace?
  • What is at stake when people choose to abide by one set of principles rather than another?

From ancient times onward, ethics has been synonymous with the attempt to answer questions about how you should act and who you should be.

Whenever you reflect on these questions, you are engaged in ethical deliberation.

Engaging in ethical deliberation enables you to live a fully ethical life.

What is Ethical Deliberation?

Ethical deliberation is an open-ended process, but it can be usefully characterized by three main features.

  1. Ethical deliberation goes beyond simply following a particular set of rules.
    • Although rules like "be kind," "tell the truth" and "promote the general good" might help you to be more ethical, you have to notice when you are in a situation to which the rules apply if they are to be of any real use.
    • Since every person faces slightly different circumstances, you also have to understand how the rules can be applied to a wide variety of situations.
    • There will also be times when you need to figure out which rules are justified, or whether any of the usual rules are applicable at all. Your judgments may often depend crucially on the details of the particular case.
  2. Ethical deliberation is an ongoing activity that lies in the background of all human endeavors.
    • It is not a special kind of thinking, or something that you can decide to engage in now and then.
    • Every choice has an ethical dimension, because every choice reveals something about what you currently value, and in some sense, who you really are.
  3. Ethical deliberation is never purely personal.
    • Everyone spends at least some time thinking about how well they are living their life, because everyone wants to make their own life as worthwhile and enjoyable as possible. But while you must ultimately be able to live with ourselves, you must also be able to live with other people.
    • If you cannot justify your choices to anyone other than yourself, you have at least some reason to question the adequacy of your own deliberations.

Despite the open-ended character of ethical deliberation, not just anything can count as an ethical choice. You must be able to give reasons for your choices, and to articulate values or principles that other people can understand.

Why Should I Care About Ethics?

  1. The best reason to care about ethics is to realize that ethical deliberation is inescapable for anyone who cares about anything.
  2. Other people will likely evaluate your conduct even if you do not, so caring about ethics is a way to make sure that you are not constantly violating other people's expectations of you.
  3. All human institutions, including families, schools, workplaces, governments, and even friendships, embody codes of ethics. You need to understand both what these codes are, and why people believe they are justified, if you are to navigate these institutions successfully.
    As you learn about those deeper justifications, you'll probably learn something important about yourself. And who knows? You might even be the person who discovers a new and better ethical code.
To ask why you should care about ethics is essentially to ask why you should live your life one way rather than another. And that is already to engage in ethical deliberation!

Isn't It Unethical To Be Judgmental?

Since ethics is in the business of evaluating human conduct, at some level the answer to this question has to be, “To be ethical, you must make judgments.”

But you should be clear about what making an ethical judgment involves.

  • To reject someone else's values simply because they are different is not yet to judge that the other person’s values are wrong…it is only to ignore them.
  • Similarly, to accept someone else's values despite the fact that they conflict with yours is not to judge that the other person’s values are better, but only to disregard your own.
  • In addition, to discover that someone else's values are different than yours is not yet to judge that either set of values are bad or wrong.

It may turn out that both people's values are equally justified, and even compatible with one anther in a wide variety of situations. The ability to recognize and understand when this occurs is essential to your capacity for tolerance, and tolerance is surely an important ethical trait.

But still, there will be times when tolerance is unwarranted, and that is why being ethical includes:

  • Identifying bad conduct
  • Being able to explain why it is deserving of our negative evaluation

You make these sorts of judgments all the time, so surely there's nothing wrong with doing this openly and self-consciously.

Indeed, being able to explain why you make the judgments that you do is probably the best chance you have of helping yourself, and other people, live ethically better lives.

Who's to Say What Is Ethical (And What Is Not)?

This is an important question, for at least two reasons:

  1. It reminds us that ethics is always about explaining why you are justified in thinking, feeling and acting as you do.
    If someone calls you unethical, they certainly owe you an explanation of how you have failed to live up to some important standard (just as you would owe them an explanation if you were critical of their conduct).
  2. It reminds you that no person or institution has moral authority simply because of who or what they are.
    Moral authority has to be earned, and it is earned in the same way that each of person earns their own reputations…by explaining why the things it calls ethical are worthy of anyone’s positive evaluation.

In the end, therefore, the answer to the "Who's to say" question must always be, "You are!" You will always be confronted with choices, and you will at least sometimes be confronted by people with whom you disagree.

In all situations, the ethical task is to figure out when and why you can honestly say that your choices are good ones. That is why everyone needs to develop the capacity for ethical deliberation.