the intensity or the serious harm that it causes to other
people is the last characteristic of moral awareness.
So, again, this is not where we're going
to be focusing our time. The important
part, probably, once you've gotten that
information into your head--that this is
a moral issue--the hard part, the
difficult part, is the moral judgment
phase. So let's look at... In the book, they
talk about seven issues or seven
characteristics of sound ethical
decision making. So let's just walk
through those on the next slide.
The first step--and, again, some of these sound
kind of obvious, but, if you very
carefully think through the process,
you'll probably do a better job of
making that ethical decision, so they're
really trying to give you very careful
steps that a good ethical decision maker would
go through. The first one is to gather
the facts--that you need to really look
around and get a lot of information to
help you to make a valid ethical decision.
You can't just do it on the fly
with minimal information. You have to be
a very careful information seeker. Ok? The
second one, define the ethical issues. And
this takes work, this is not something
that you can just do on the spur of the
moment. You have to sit down and think
about, what is the obvious ethical issue,
maybe, involved, but then again what is
the, you know, secondary or tertiary
ethical issue? What are all of the
characteristics of the situation that
could lead to ethical
decision making, or that could
eventually lead to ethical harm. You then
identify the affected parties, and you'll
see when we get to the ethical judgment
section of the course that some theories,
some judgment rules, that you would use
actually go further with this idea of
the affected party, some go further with
the actual content of the decision
that you're making. So in this case
you'd say, "Okay, these are the people or
the groups that would be affected by the
outcomes of my actions." You want to know
who those people are--what their
characteristics are. Then you would look
at the actual consequences of the
decision. You don't necessarily have
to have every last consequence,
because it would be almost impossible,
but you'd really think hard about what
would the impact of your decision--in
either case--be on those affected
parties? So you want to be very careful
about what you're doing to other people.
The next one is you identify your
obligations. So not only do you know that
this behavior that you're considering
would affect these parties, it's also, if
you've made a promise, for instance, to
someone that you would be somewhere at
six o'clock, you have to consider that as
a stronger obligation than just what
would the affected parties be if you
either showed up or didn't show up at
six o'clock. Consider your character and
integrity. This is obviously a little bit
of a sticky wicket, because everyone
thinks they have a great character and
they have lots of integrity, but you
really want to think through whether or
not a person--maybe an abstract person--
with good integrity or a good character
or someone you know and admire would
actually do the thing that you're
considering doing--whether you've
gotten that far in the decision-making
process. Finally, before you actually make
the last emotional move, you think
creatively about your potential actions.
And, again, as we were talking about
earlier in terms of information
gathering, that does not mean, "Oh, there's
an obvious answer to this." When I was a
manager, I often used to kind of take
action maybe prematurely. I look back
now on some of the decisions I made and
I maybe solved the problem a little bit
too quickly. Really, what you need to do
is consider alternatives and think about
the different actions you could take to
solve your problem--maybe even bounce it
around with some people, as we'll talk about
in a few minutes. But consider the creative
possibilities that are available to you
to solve this ethical problem. And, finally,
you know as comes up several times in
the book, check your gut. See if your
instincts or your intuition or your
emotions--whatever it is that makes that
gut work--check your gut and see if you
think, "Oh, if I did this, I'd feel good about it."
Or, "If I did this, I'd be kind of
embarrassed." "If I did this, my friends
would appreciate it." So, just, as a
last check before you go out and take
that ethical action, that you would be
seeing if you're okay with it
emotionally or from kind of an
intuition point of view. So those are the
eight steps of ethical decision-making
to a sound decision making process.
I know it sounds like a lot of work--it
actually is a lot of work--but what
you'll probably find is that you do this
all the time. You just maybe aren't aware
of it, you're not doing it consciously,
a lot of it you are running through
quickly because you've been doing it
your whole life. What we're trying to do
here is make it a little more explicit,
make it a little more important in the
workplace that you would actually
consciously go through these processes.
And, so, after it now, we've talked about
the general ethical decision-making
process, we're going to hone in, as I
mentioned, in the model on the
characteristics of organizations that
make it maybe more difficult, maybe
easier, to make that ethical decision and
the individual characteristics. So after
we talk to you about organizations, I'll be back
to talk about individual differences.
Thanks.
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