THE BEST YOU CAN HOPE FOR

How can you ever know if you are even heading in the right direction when it comes to ethics? Short of relying entirely on your gut reaction ”which is often referred to as intuition and is actually useful to some extent ”the type of decision that you are required to make in such cases is the key. What you need to accomplish is choosing a defensible solution.

An ethically defensible decision is one which you can live with and for which you are able to provide a reasonable, ethics-based rationale to observers. Make no mistake, you will often be required to provide such justification for these decisions since there are few black and white ethical situations about which everyone agrees. In solving ethical problems, it is a fact of life that there will be someone who will disagree with your decision. Where, then, do you find this defence for your decision?

There are several venues where we can look for such defences for our decisions:

• The principled decision: This is a decision which is based upon a well-thought-out application of the ethical principles that have guided ethical decision-making through history. These principles are those that we discussed earlier, such as doing no harm, an attempt to serve justice , telling the truth and so on, and the approaches to decision-making offered to us by such philosophers as Aristotle, Kant and Mill, to name a few.

• The precedent decision: This type of decision uses a kind of case law if you like. Similar situations that have already been resolved can provide a certain amount of guidance largely because their outcomes are already known. This is especially useful since judging potential outcomes is clearly a big part of making ethical decisions. However, precise predictions of outcomes are usually not possible.

• The patron decision: This is a decision wherein we look to those who have more experience than we do in both our professional practice and in facing and dealing with ethical decisions. You need to be able to trust the judgement of your ˜patron and yet still be able to take full responsibility for the decision that you make based on such advice.

In the end, decision-making is a process ”one that we know a lot about in our business, but one that has special considerations in ethical practice.