Chapter 2
Ethical Decision Making: Personal
and Professional Contexts
A Decision-Making Process for Ethics
• Ethical decision making process: Requires a
persuasive and rational justification for a
decision.
A Decision-Making Process for Ethics
Rational justifications are developed through a
logical process of decision making that gives
proper attention to such things as:
• Facts
• Alternative perspectives
• Consequences to all stakeholders
• Ethical principle
A Decision-Making Process for Ethics
The ethical decision-making process includes:
1. Determine the facts.
2. Identify the ethical issues involved.
3. Identify stakeholders and consider the situation from
their point of view.
4. Consider the available alternatives—also called using
moral imagination.
5. Compare and weigh the alternatives, based on:
– Consequences (for all stakeholders).
– Duties, rights, principles.
– Implications for personal integrity and character.
6. Make a decision.
7. Monitor and learn from the outcomes.
A Decision-Making Process for Ethics
• Perceptual differences surrounding how
individuals experience and understand
situations can explain many ethical
disagreements.
• Making an honest effort to understand the
situation, to distinguish facts from mere
opinion, is essential.
A Decision-Making Process for Ethics
• In business contexts, it can be easy to become
so involved in the technical aspects of
decisions that one loses sight of the ethical
aspects.
• Normative myopia, or shortsightedness
about values: The tendency to ignore, or the
lack of the ability to recognize, ethical issues in
decision making.
A Decision-Making Process for Ethics
• Inattentional blindness: If we happen to focus
on or are told specifically to pay attention to a
particular element of a decision or event, we
are likely to miss all of the surrounding details,
no matter how obvious.
A Decision-Making Process for Ethics
• Change blindness: A decision-making
omission that occurs when decision makers
fail to notice gradual changes over time.
A Decision-Making Process for Ethics
• A stakeholder is a party that has an interest in
a company and can either affect or be affected
by the organization’s actions.
Stakeholders
[
Business
A Decision-Making Process for Ethics
• Creativity in identifying ethical options—also
called moral imagination —is one element
that distinguishes good people who make
ethically responsible decisions from good
people who do not.
A Decision-Making Process for Ethics
Moral imagination: When one is facing an
ethical decision, the ability to envision various:
• Alternative choices
• Consequences
• Resolutions
• Benefits
• Harms
When Ethical Decision Making Goes Wrong:
Why Do “Good” People Engage in “Bad” Acts?
• Some stumbling blocks standing in the way of
responsible action are cognitive or
intellectual.
• A certain type of ignorance can account for
bad ethical choices.
• Sometimes that ignorance can be almost
willful and intentional.
When Ethical Decision Making Goes Wrong:
Why Do “Good” People Engage in “Bad” Acts?
• Another cognitive barrier is that we
sometimes consider only limited alternatives.
• When faced with a situation that suggests two
clear alternative ways forward, we often
consider only those two clear paths, missing
the fact that other alternatives might be
possible.
When Ethical Decision Making Goes Wrong:
Why Do “Good” People Engage in “Bad” Acts?
• Human beings generally feel most comfortable
with simplified decision rules.
• For example, assume you are a business
manager who feels the need to terminate a
worker in order to cut costs. It may be easiest
and most comfortable to terminate the last
person you hired, explaining, “I can’t help it; it
must be done, ‘last in/first out’.
When Ethical Decision Making Goes Wrong:
Why Do “Good” People Engage in “Bad” Acts?
• We also often select the alternative that
satisfies minimum decision criteria.
When Ethical Decision Making Goes Wrong:
Why Do “Good” People Engage in “Bad” Acts?
• Other stumbling blocks standing in the way of
responsible actions are less intellectual or
cognitive than they are a question of
motivation and willpower.
• Sometimes it is simply easier to do the wrong
thing.
When Ethical Decision Making Goes Wrong:
Why Do “Good” People Engage in “Bad” Acts?
• People sometimes make decisions they later
regret because they lack the courage to do
otherwise.
• It is not always easy to make the right decision;
you might lose:
– Your income
– Your job
– Other valuable components of your life
• Courage is also necessary when responding to
significant peer pressure.
When Ethical Decision Making Goes Wrong:
Why Do “Good” People Engage in “Bad” Acts?
(They influence us
We tend to give in to peer pressure in our
professional environments because:
1• We want to “fit in” and to achieve success in
our organizations.
2)• Our actual thinking is influenced by our peers.
When Ethical Decision Making Goes Wrong:
Why Do “Good” People Engage in “Bad” Acts?
• We worry that our disagreement means that
we might be wrong.
• Accordingly, we either:
– Change our minds to fit our environments
– Listen only for the evidence that supports this
new way of thinking until our minds slowly change
on their own.
Ethical Decision Making in Managerial
Roles
• Individual decision making can be influenced
by the social context in which it occurs. (It
should
• Social circumstances can make it easier or
more difficult to act in accordance with one’s
own best judgment.
Ethical Decision Making in Managerial
Roles
• An organization’s context sometimes makes it
difficult for people to act ethically, even when
they really want to.
Ethical Decision Making in Managerial
Roles
• Responsibility for the circumstances that can
encourage ethical behavior and can
discourage unethical behavior falls
predominantly to the business management
and executive team.
* If Here is a good role model (boss) , everything
would be eldical .
(ex :
employees come
of E
,
boss also
comes at 8)
Ethical Decision Making in Managerial
Roles
Personal and professional decision making:
Individuals within a business setting are often in
situations in which they must make decisions
both from:
• Their own personal point of view and from
• The perspective of the specific role they fill
within an institution.
Ethical Decision Making in Managerial
Roles
• Ethically responsible decisions require an
individual to recognize that these perspectives
can conflict.
• A life of moral integrity must balance the
personal values with the professional role-
based values and responsibilities.