Before making any ethical decision, one should take which of the following actions?

Chapter 3: Ethical Dilemmas and the Process of Effective Resolution

Table of Contents Show

What is Ethics?
Six Ethical Lenses
Using the Lenses
Making Decisions

With values as focal point, the National Association of Social Workers has created a framework that is used by social workers to address ethical dilemmas. The framework includes six steps:

Determine whether there is an ethical issue or/and dilemma. Is there a conflict of values, or rights, or professional responsibilities?
Identify the key values and principles involved. What meanings and limitations are typically attached to these competing values?
Rank the values or ethical principles which – in your professional judgement – are most relevant to the issue or dilemma. What reasons can you provide for prioritizing one competing value/principle over another?
Develop an action plan that is consistent with the ethical priorities that have been determined as central to the dilemma. Have you conferred with clients and colleagues, as appropriate, about the potential risks and consequences of alternative courses of action? Can you support or justify your action plan with the values/principles on which the plan is based?
Implement your plan, utilizing the most appropriate practice skills and competencies. How will you make use of core social work skills such as sensitive communication, skillful negotiation, and cultural competence?
Reflect on the outcome of this ethical decision making process. How would you evaluate the consequences of this process for those involved: client(s), professional(s), and agency(ies)?

In comparison, Evans and MacMillan (2014) have developed a framework involving 10 steps to make ethical decision-making efficient and practical. This framework is specific to law enforcement officers and addresses the consideration of laws, regulations, policy, and procedures that other frameworks assume will be followed, but in law enforcement are very important to avoid charges and allow cases against suspects to proceed. The framework concludes with a follow-up to determine the effectiveness of the course of action taken by the officer.

As a simple alternative to these frameworks, students should consider the following framework:

Establish the facts surrounding the ethical dilemma.
Facts are important in law enforcement. To investigate all cases, officers must rely on facts to guard against misinformation and cognitive biases. This is also true in ethical dilemmas that we face. If the facts are not known to us, we must investigate everything that surrounds the dilemma to ensure we are acting on the right information. Avoid acting on rumours and gossip by verifying information through factual information and evidence.
Determine your legal obligations and duties.
We must be sure what our professional and legal obligations are. Professional and legal obligations will likely allow us to easily decide on a course of action to take in an ethical dilemma. However, while professional and legal obligations may not always require a course of action that coincides with these obligations, our awareness of any professional and legal obligations must be known to allow us to be fully cognizant of the consequences of our actions should we choose to ignore professional or legal obligations.
Establish the interested participants involved.
It is important to know who will be impacted by the course of action that we decide upon. Often the primary participants are easy to identify and it is the secondary participants that are often not considered. These may include friends, families, or employees that are related somehow to the primary participants in the ethical dilemma. Knowing the impact of the decision made to secondary participants may be particularly important for a decision made with utilitarian underpinnings; where the rights of those who are not part of the majority may not be considered.
Determine the ethical values of each participant.
Determining ethical values is important to allow us an understanding of what is truly at stake. A participant in an ethical dilemma may value loyalty as the most important value. However, another participant may value equality as the more important value. When considered, the value of loyalty may not compare with equality, depending upon the ethical dilemma.
Consider normative ethical theories as an aide to determine a course of action.
When considering options, normative ethical theories may assist us in determining the consequences of actions, or the duties we may be obligated to follow that fall outside of the laws, rules, and procedures. We may also assess whether the decision we are considering is rational from another perspective we have not considered. We may also settle on an option, and rely on an ethical theory to assist us in articulating the reasoning behind the option we have chosen.
Consider options that would be ethically sound.
There may be several options to consider, and each option ought to be considered critically by determining what harm it would cause and what values the person being harmed holds. The participant should consider the positives and negatives of the decision and determine the risks and benefits associated with each option, as well as the benefits of each action, with these values in mind.
Consideration of the possible negative and positive outcomes of each possible option.
Try to predict what may otherwise be unintended consequences of your decision. These consequences may not be readily apparent, but they require a critical analysis of the consequences of your decision. To help with this, try asking the following questions:
- Would the action taken be well received if it was on the front page of a newspaper? While this should be a consideration, keep in mind that often the right decision may be the least popular in public opinion.
- If the decision is job-related, would the agency or company you work for still hire you if it knew you would make this decision? If the answer is yes, then this should give weight to the decision you are about to make.
- If the decision is not job-related, would the agency you would like to work for still hire you if it knew all the facts surrounding the dilemma and the decision you would make? If the answer is yes, then this should give weight to the decision you are about to make.

Implement options after considering steps 1-7.

This document is designed as an introduction to thinking ethically. Read more about what the framework can (and cannot) do.

We all have an image of our better selves—of how we are when we act ethically or are “at our best.” We probably also have an image of what an ethical community, an ethical business, an ethical government, or an ethical society should be. Ethics really has to do with all these levels—acting ethically as individuals, creating ethical organizations and governments, and making our society as a whole more ethical in the way it treats everyone.

What is Ethics?

Ethics refers to standards and practices that tell us how human beings ought to act in the many situations in which they find themselves—as friends, parents, children, citizens, businesspeople, professionals, and so on. Ethics is also concerned with our character. It requires knowledge, skills, and habits.

It is helpful to identify what ethics is NOT:

Ethics is not the same as feelings. Feelings do provide important information for our ethical choices. However, while some people have highly developed habits that make them feel bad when they do something wrong, others feel good even though they are doing something wrong. And, often, our feelings will tell us that it is uncomfortable to do the right thing if it is difficult.
Ethics is not the same as religion. Many people are not religious but act ethically, and some religious people act unethically. Religious traditions can, however, develop and advocate for high ethical standards, such as the Golden Rule.
Ethics is not the same thing as following the law. A good system of law does incorporate many ethical standards, but law can deviate from what is ethical. Law can become ethically corrupt—a function of power alone and designed to serve the interests of narrow groups. Law may also have a difficult time designing or enforcing standards in some important areas and may be slow to address new problems.
Ethics is not the same as following culturally accepted norms. Cultures can include both ethical and unethical customs, expectations, and behaviors. While assessing norms, it is important to recognize how one’s ethical views can be limited by one’s own cultural perspective or background, alongside being culturally sensitive to others.
Ethics is not science. Social and natural science can provide important data to help us make better and more informed ethical choices. But science alone does not tell us what we ought to do. Some things may be scientifically or technologically possible and yet unethical to develop and deploy.

Six Ethical Lenses

If our ethical decision-making is not solely based on feelings, religion, law, accepted social practice, or science, then on what basis can we decide between right and wrong, good and bad? Many philosophers, ethicists, and theologians have helped us answer this critical question. They have suggested a variety of different lenses that help us perceive ethical dimensions. Here are six of them:

The Rights Lens

Some suggest that the ethical action is the one that best protects and respects the moral rights of those affected. This approach starts from the belief that humans have a dignity based on their human nature per se or on their ability to choose freely what they do with their lives. On the basis of such dignity, they have a right to be treated as ends in themselves and not merely as means to other ends. The list of moral rights—including the rights to make one's own choices about what kind of life to lead, to be told the truth, not to be injured, to a degree of privacy, and so on—is widely debated; some argue that non-humans have rights, too. Rights are also often understood as implying duties—in particular, the duty to respect others' rights and dignity.

(For further elaboration on the rights lens, please see our essay, “Rights.”)

The Justice Lens

Justice is the idea that each person should be given their due, and what people are due is often interpreted as fair or equal treatment. Equal treatment implies that people should be treated as equals according to some defensible standard such as merit or need, but not necessarily that everyone should be treated in the exact same way in every respect. There are different types of justice that address what people are due in various contexts. These include social justice (structuring the basic institutions of society), distributive justice (distributing benefits and burdens), corrective justice (repairing past injustices), retributive justice (determining how to appropriately punish wrongdoers), and restorative or transformational justice (restoring relationships or transforming social structures as an alternative to criminal punishment).

(For further elaboration on the justice lens, please see our essay, “Justice and Fairness.”)

The Utilitarian Lens

Some ethicists begin by asking, “How will this action impact everyone affected?”—emphasizing the consequences of our actions. Utilitarianism, a results-based approach, says that the ethical action is the one that produces the greatest balance of good over harm for as many stakeholders as possible. It requires an accurate determination of the likelihood of a particular result and its impact. For example, the ethical corporate action, then, is the one that produces the greatest good and does the least harm for all who are affected—customers, employees, shareholders, the community, and the environment. Cost/benefit analysis is another consequentialist approach.

(For further elaboration on the utilitarian lens, please see our essay, “Calculating Consequences.”)

The Common Good Lens

According to the common good approach, life in community is a good in itself and our actions should contribute to that life. This approach suggests that the interlocking relationships of society are the basis of ethical reasoning and that respect and compassion for all others—especially the vulnerable—are requirements of such reasoning. This approach also calls attention to the common conditions that are important to the welfare of everyone—such as clean air and water, a system of laws, effective police and fire departments, health care, a public educational system, or even public recreational areas. Unlike the utilitarian lens, which sums up and aggregates goods for every individual, the common good lens highlights mutual concern for the shared interests of all members of a community.

(For further elaboration on the common good lens, please see our essay, “The Common Good.”)

The Virtue Lens

A very ancient approach to ethics argues that ethical actions ought to be consistent with certain ideal virtues that provide for the full development of our humanity. These virtues are dispositions and habits that enable us to act according to the highest potential of our character and on behalf of values like truth and beauty. Honesty, courage, compassion, generosity, tolerance, love, fidelity, integrity, fairness, self-control, and prudence are all examples of virtues. Virtue ethics asks of any action, “What kind of person will I become if I do this?” or “Is this action consistent with my acting at my best?”

(For further elaboration on the virtue lens, please see our essay, “Ethics and Virtue.”)

The Care Ethics Lens

Care ethics is rooted in relationships and in the need to listen and respond to individuals in their specific circumstances, rather than merely following rules or calculating utility. It privileges the flourishing of embodied individuals in their relationships and values interdependence, not just independence. It relies on empathy to gain a deep appreciation of the interest, feelings, and viewpoints of each stakeholder, employing care, kindness, compassion, generosity, and a concern for others to resolve ethical conflicts. Care ethics holds that options for resolution must account for the relationships, concerns, and feelings of all stakeholders. Focusing on connecting intimate interpersonal duties to societal duties, an ethics of care might counsel, for example, a more holistic approach to public health policy that considers food security, transportation access, fair wages, housing support, and environmental protection alongside physical health.

(Our essay elaborating further on the care ethics lens is forthcoming.)

Using the Lenses

Each of the lenses introduced above helps us determine what standards of behavior and character traits can be considered right and good. There are still problems to be solved, however.

The first problem is that we may not agree on the content of some of these specific lenses. For example, we may not all agree on the same set of human and civil rights. We may not agree on what constitutes the common good. We may not even agree on what is a good and what is a harm.

The second problem is that the different lenses may lead to different answers to the question “What is ethical?” Nonetheless, each one gives us important insights in the process of deciding what is ethical in a particular circumstance.

Making Decisions

Making good ethical decisions requires a trained sensitivity to ethical issues and a practiced method for exploring the ethical aspects of a decision and weighing the considerations that should impact our choice of a course of action. Having a method for ethical decision-making is essential. When practiced regularly, the method becomes so familiar that we work through it automatically without consulting the specific steps.

The more novel and difficult the ethical choice we face, the more we need to rely on discussion and dialogue with others about the dilemma. Only by careful exploration of the problem, aided by the insights and different perspectives of others, can we make good ethical choices in such situations.

The following framework for ethical decision-making is intended to serve as a practical tool for exploring ethical dilemmas and identifying ethical courses of action.

Identify the Ethical Issues

Could this decision or situation be damaging to someone or to some group, or unevenly beneficial to people? Does this decision involve a choice between a good and bad alternative, or perhaps between two “goods” or between two “bads”?
Is this issue about more than solely what is legal or what is most efficient? If so, how?

Get the Facts

What are the relevant facts of the case? What facts are not known? Can I learn more about the situation? Do I know enough to make a decision?
What individuals and groups have an important stake in the outcome? Are the concerns of some of those individuals or groups more important? Why?
What are the options for acting? Have all the relevant persons and groups been consulted? Have I identified creative options?

Evaluate Alternative Actions

Evaluate the options by asking the following questions:

Which option best respects the rights of all who have a stake? (The Rights Lens)
Which option treats people fairly, giving them each what they are due? (The Justice Lens)
Which option will produce the most good and do the least harm for as many stakeholders as possible? (The Utilitarian Lens)
Which option best serves the community as a whole, not just some members? (The Common Good Lens)
Which option leads me to act as the sort of person I want to be? (The Virtue Lens)
Which option appropriately takes into account the relationships, concerns, and feelings of all stakeholders? (The Care Ethics Lens)

Choose an Option for Action and Test It

After an evaluation using all of these lenses, which option best addresses the situation?
If I told someone I respect (or a public audience) which option I have chosen, what would they say?
How can my decision be implemented with the greatest care and attention to the concerns of all stakeholders?

Implement Your Decision and Reflect on the Outcome

How did my decision turn out, and what have I learned from this specific situation? What (if any) follow-up actions should I take?

This framework for thinking ethically is the product of dialogue and debate at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Primary contributors include Manuel Velasquez, Dennis Moberg, Michael J. Meyer, Thomas Shanks, Margaret R. McLean, David DeCosse, Claire André, Kirk O. Hanson, Irina Raicu, and Jonathan Kwan. It was last revised on November 5, 2021.