From Judith McDaniel
Which ethical principle do you follow? Is it about the common good? Fairness? Individual rights? Or the utilitarian principle of looking at the outcome rather than the process? This week’s issue of Ethics Newsline looked at the headlines for the week and asked, What does an Ethical Organization Do? 
The answer is that it helps people put ethical issues and dilemmas in a perspective that allows us to discuss them as ethical issues and patterns rather than as personal opinions. The three issues they looked at last week were the firing of General McChrystal, the senate’s failure to pass unemployment benefits, and the further endangerment of sea turtles by the burning off of spilled fuel in the Gulf.
It’s an interesting exercise—taking our “in my opinion” statements and trying to see whether there is an ethical principle supporting that opinion and, if so, which principle is it and what different results would we get if we used a different principle? Here is one example from the Institute for Global Ethics. Those who thought the General’s firing was right probably based that opinion on a sense of fair play (no enlisted man could talk about an officer that way, why should a general?). Those who thought he shouldn’t have been fired may have been relying on individual rights as a principle (he has a protected First Amendment right to speak his mind), but that does not work here since there are limits to the free speech right and those limits include clear violations of the law—in this case the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the United States treason laws. What would be an ethical argument against the general’s firing is the Utilitarian argument—if it works, it is good. This is certainly my least favorite of the ethical principles and not one I use often. But it has at least the virtue of forcing the arguers to come up with some evidence that what the general was doing as he directed the war in Afghanistan was actually working and contributing to the common good.
Finding the ethical principle that supports (or is violated by) an argument would be a good exercise for the practice of public discourse in any context—politics, online blogs, the classroom. It takes us away from those “knee-jerk” responses that are based on emotion and requires us to actually examine why we think the way we do.
Tags: endangered sea turtles, ethical principles, ethics, fairness, General McChrystal, unemployment benefits, Utilitarian
