Ethics in decision making looks at how people identify decisions with ethical impact.
Ethics in decision making is an area of ethics that concerns decision making. Ethics is a standard of conduct that can be applied to a wide range of situations, from medical practice to running a large company. People make decisions big and small every day within the framework of ethics, and ethics in decision-making looks specifically at how people make decisions and how ethics can be incorporated into decision-making.
Ethical decision making comes into play for medical professionals when determining the best course of treatment for a patient.
There are several different approaches to ethics, including the utilitarian approach, the common good approach, the virtue approach, and the justice approach. Each involves different values and beliefs that shape the ethics that people apply to a situation. For example, the utilitarian approach is based on what does the greatest good for the greatest number of people, once all the costs and benefits of a decision have been taken into account. The values of an ethical system play an important role in how people decide which options are the most ethical.
Ethical decision making comes into play for police officers when determining the best way to handle a given situation.
The practice of ethics in decision making looks at how people identify decisions with ethical impact and how they can work through a decision to arrive at an ethical choice. This process includes clearly describing and discussing the decision, weighing the costs and benefits against the benefit of information about the decision, and finally developing several potential responses that can be tested before choosing the best response. Many people working in this field also seek self-assessment after the choice has been made, as people reflect on what happened and whether or not the decision worked as planned.
Things to consider when applying ethics to decision making include the impact each potential option will have, the purpose of the decision, how people will respond, who will be affected by the decision, and what concerns should be focused on in the process. decision making and how the decision will be applied. Given all these issues, people try to come up with an option that is ethical and defensible, even if it doesn’t suit everyone.
Ethical decision making can be applied to situations such as developing a new workplace policy, running a business, caring for patients, and making charitable donations. It is important to remember that ethics is a broad framework with many approaches and interpretations, and that individual situations must be evaluated independently. What works in one case may not be ethical in another, even if the two cases seem superficially similar to observers.