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REASON AND
IMPARTIALITY AS
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
FOR MORALITY
GEC08 - Ethics
The minimum
requirements of morality
is reason and
impartiality.
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Impartiality
• Treating everyone and their interests
equally, without any favoritism or
bias (Yaghini, Liu, Boenisch, &
Papernot, 2023).
Impartiality
• This principle is crucial for ethical
decision-making and navigating moral
dilemmas, as it promotes fairness and
equity by requiring us to consider all
perspectives and values equally.
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Read the following
scenarios, identify what
would be the
reasonable thing to do.
Your best friend and a less-liked
colleague both apply for the same job
you're managing.
Option A: Hire your friend.
Option B: Hire the more qualified colleague
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You're a teacher and your child and
another student both break the same
classroom rule.
Option A: Excuse your child's behavior.
Option B: Discipline both students equally.
You're a judge and a wealthy, influential
person and a poor, unknown person are
both accused of the same crime.
Option A: Give the wealthy person a lighter sentence.
Option B: Sentence both individuals based on the law
and evidence.
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Reason
• It enables individuals to evaluate
the consequences of their
actions and consider relevant
ethical principles (Jiang et al.,
2023).
Reason
• Through careful reasoning,
individuals can weigh potential
outcomes and assess their
impact on others, ultimately
guiding their moral choices.
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Reno told Sheila, an employee, that
she was not qualified for a
promotion, while Javier, who held
the same position and had similar
experience, was shortlisted.
What justification could
Reno offer to make the
judgment seem
unreasonable?
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What justification could
Reno offer to make the
judgment seem
reasonable?
The process of justifying
impartiality and reasoning
is what constitutes moral
decision-making.
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7 Steps Model for Making Moral
Decisions
• Gather the facts
• Determine the ethical issues
• Identify the principles that have a
bearing on the case
• List the alternatives
7 Steps Model for Making Moral
Decisions
• Compare alternatives with
principles
• Assess the consequences and
test options
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How to test options
• Harm Test
• Publicity Test
• Defensibility Test
• Reversibility Test
How to test options
• Colleague Test
• Professional Test
• Organization Test
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7 Steps Model for Making Moral
Decisions
• Make a descision
Value Clarification
• A method, as part of moral
reasoning, is composed of a
series of questions asked in
order to arrive at one's values.
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Did you choose your action freely
from among alternatives after
thoughtfully considering the
consequences of each
alternative?
Do you cherish your choice by
publicly affirming it and by
campaigning for others to choose
it?
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Do you act on your choice
repeatedly and consistently?
Value Clarification
• If your answer is YES to
the following questions
then your choice/decision
is a product of reason.
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Creative Responsibility
• Responding creatively, either
verbally or nonverbally, to a call to
address a problem by considering all
perspectives, thinking outside the
box, and using relevant frameworks.
THANK YOU
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REFERENCES
Yaghini, M., et al. (2023). Learning with Impartiality to Walk on the
Pareto Frontier of Fairness, Privacy, and Utility. [Link],
abs/2302.09183.
Jiang, J. et al. (2023). StructGPT: A General Framework for Large
Language Model to Reason over Structured Data. In Conference on
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 9237-9251).
Chamberlain, R. (2012, May 17). Rae, Moral Choices: Ch4 - Making
ethical decisions [Slide show]. SlideShare.
[Link]
ethical-decisions/12965991
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