What are the ethical principles involved in decision-making?

Founder & Head Coach/CEO, The Funds2Orgs Group.

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The digital revolution impacted all aspects of people's lives, including leadership. As a result, how leaders communicate with their teams and the public is more transparent and accessible than ever. With this shift, there’s a need for mindful, ethical decision-making recognizing the impact of digital decisions on larger populations. Moreover, it’s essential to grow your business and remain relevant.

How does a leader practice ethical decision-making? The answer is discussing three critical principles for ethical decision-making: transparency, responsibility and empathy. These principles are essential for all leaders to consider as they navigate the challenges and opportunities of the digital era. Moreover, leaders must think about how decisions can impact others through good and bad consequences moving forward.

The Role Of Leadership In The Digital Era

Leadership in the digital age is a tricky topic. With unprecedented access to information and evidence, leaders face difficult decisions that may have consequences for businesses and organizations at large. It can be incredibly challenging for ethical decision-making since many of the implications of these decisions may not be apparent until after the decision happens.

To navigate this new era, you want to take a leadership approach mindful of three fundamental principles: transparency, responsibility and empathy. These principles enable you to make informed decisions while also considering their impact on your entire organization or community.

Transparency is a core leadership principle that helps leaders make clear and consistent decisions. Leaders should be open about their values, ethical standards and other aspects of their leadership philosophy. Doing so allows employees, your customers and the public to know what they should expect from someone who serves as a business leader.

Responsibility is another critical principle in influencing ethical decision-making because it forces leaders to consider the broader impacts of their actions before making a final decision. When making a crucial decision for your company, think beyond just how it will impact you or your team members — think about what could happen if it gets out into the public realm or affects other stakeholders in any way.

Lastly, empathy is the soft skill of feeling like standing in someone else's shoes. In other words, it's the ability to understand someone else's feelings. This principle is essential, especially in the digital age, when smart offices, remote work and digital information could cloud our thinking and ideas. When a leader empathizes, they create positive relationships.

Three Key Principles To Guide Ethical Decision-Making

Leaders often face difficult decisions that carry wide-ranging consequences. As more and more of your leadership happens digitally, it becomes increasingly vital to think about your decisions' impact on others.

1. Transparency

Transparency has been a top topic in the past few years. The use of technology has made it easier for people to catch others in actual or perceived wrongdoings because the information is shared so quickly, and anyone can find out what's going on. Therefore, there’s a high demand for transparency because it creates a level playing field. A lack of transparency can get misinterpreted as hiding things.

If you're not open about your actions or what you do with your time, people will question what you're trying to hide. Transparent leaders earn more respect from their followers because they know they can trust them. To establish this trust, leaders must be honest and straightforward about their decisions and why they make them.

2. Responsibility

For decisions, it’s essential to consider the implications of an action. It means looking at how decisions will impact society as well as yourself. You must be aware of your efforts' potential consequences on others and not just yourself. As digital technology advances, business leaders have more ways to make decisions that can have a significant societal impact. For instance, it's much easier to let go of workers without notice.

This change has negative implications for employees who rely on their steady income to meet expenses or save for retirement. The decision by employers to terminate without notice could lead to these employees experiencing financial insecurity and lacking necessities like food and shelter. As digital technology advances, leaders need to think about how their decision-making will impact themselves and those around them through good and bad consequences.

3. Empathy

The most important of these three principles is empathy. Empathy is defined as the ability to understand the feelings of another person. It's hard to be empathetic in an online world, but that doesn't mean it isn't vital. Remember, real people exist on the other end of your online interactions, not just screens. With digital marketing, you can reach so many people so quickly, which means you have the potential to do great good — or harm.

As a leader, you want to make sure you consider how your choices could affect others around you. That's why it's essential to consider how your actions impact those around you before taking any action. You also want to think about how each decision affects those who interact with your brand online — whether that's through social media posts, ads or something else entirely! It's also why it's so crucial for leaders to be mindful of their digital decisions and ensure they're ethically sound.

Doing Better For Your Company And The Public

Modern leaders, especially those with an online presence, are simultaneously expected to be perfect and imperfect. It’s partially due to the never-ending stream of content consumption, exposing every flaw and human error. But it's also because most everyone now lives in a digital era.

Therefore, leaders need more ethical leadership skills than those from earlier times. You must now think strategically and holistically about your business. And you need to understand the role of technology as the driving force for change. By making decisions with the three principles of transparency, responsibility and empathy, in mind, you’ll do better not only for your company, team and profitability, but you'll also do good for the public — and that matters.

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Dr. Gary H. Jones

Five Ethical Decision-Making Principles (Perspectives)

Summary of the Five Perspectives (table, revised)

Brief description of the Five Perspectives

Criticisms of each of the Five Perspectives

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Summary of Five Ethical Decision-Making Principles

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Brief Description of the Five Perspectives

Ethical [& Cultural] Relativism

No universal standars or rules can be used to guide the morality of an act. The logic of ethical relativism extends to cultures: cultural relativism.  As the saying goes, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."  What is morally right for one society or culture may be not be perceived as right in another.

Advantage:  Flexibility.  Social norms and values are seen in a cultural context.

Business Implications:  People doing business in a foreign country are obliged to follow that country's social values, norms, and customs (and laws, of course).

Utilitarianism

An action is judged as right or good depending upon its consequences. The ends of an action justify the means used to reach those ends.  "The greatest good for the greatest number."

Advantage:  Practical, practicable, and especially useful when resources are fixed or scarce.

Business Implications:  Useful in business (and government) because resources are usually fixed and the "greatest good" is sometimes objective and quantifiable (able to be calculated numerically). This can facilitate (simplify) decsion-making.

Universalism

A person should choose to act if and only if he or she would be willing to have every person on earth, in that same situation, act exactly that same way. There are no exceptions or qualifications.  Also, the action must respect all others, and treat people as ends, not means to an end.

Advantage:   The interests of people (as ends) are put first.  There are no exceptions, special situations, or shades of meaning (but see "criticisms" below).

Business Implications:  One only makes decisions as one would like to see all other businesses and cultures make that same decision--no exceptions.

Human Rights

Individual rights mean entitlements at birth.  These entitlements usually include the right to life, liberty, health, dignity, and choice.  These rights are often, although not always, seen as being granted to individuals by God.  Rights can override utilitarian principles.

Advantage:   Human dignity and individual worth are always protected, because they are seen as the greatest good.

Business Implications:  Businesses tend to operate from a cost/benefit (utilitarian perspective).  But business executives should be aware that in many cases, and in many cultures, individual rights must also be taken into consideration.

Justice

The principle of justice deals with fairness and equality.  Benefits and opportunities -- as well as burdens -- are to be shared equally.

Advantage:  More easily codified into regulations and laws than some other ethical principles.  Along with the Rights perspective this principle provides the foundation of many national laws.

Business Implications:  Emphasis on equal opportunity for all has an impact on hiring and promotion decisions.  The justice principle is usually written into law, and so has codified foundation. This can be helpful when making business decisions in one's own country--or in a foreign land.

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Criticisms of the Ethical PerspectivesEthical [Cultural] Relativism
1.

May suggest an underlying moral laziness. The logic of relatavism may provide an excuse for not having or developing  moral standards that can be argued and tested against other claims, opinions and standards. 2.  Contradicts everyday experience. Moral reasoning is developed from conversation, interaction, and argument. 3.  Provides no resolution for conflict of different ethical systems.

  There is no agreement on what the "good" is. Who decides? Whose interests are first? (What if the "good" conflicts among issues of health, peace, profits, pleasure, and national security?) 2.  There is no determination of the 'rightness' or 'wrongness' of actions, but only of their consequences. 3.  May fail to take into account long-term effects of an action or decision.  4.  The principles of justice and individual rights are ignored.

  The principle is imprecise; it lacks practical utility. That is, it is difficult to think of all humanity every time an ethical decision must be made. 2.  Conflicts among a person's interests, or duties, are not resolved.  How does one decide which duty comes first?

  Some individuals will pretend to advocate human rights while actually trying to advance selfish goals. 2.  Protection of rights can exaggerate certain entitlements in society at the expense of others. Do citizens of a racial minority in a society have greater rights than the majority?  What about hiring practices? 3.  The limits of rights are sometimes hard to establish.  Should an elderly person who terminally ill (no cure) be kept alive as long as possible, at great cost to society?

  Outside of the jurisdiction of the state (the government), who decides what is right and what is wrong?  What is fair? 2.  Under what circumstances can individuals disagree with the government, and what can they do about it? 3.  Related to both of the above, can opportunities and burdens be equally shared when it is not in the interest of those in power to do so?

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