The Ethics Awareness Inventory suggests that my personal ethical perspective is based on obligation. I strongly believe that my approach to ethics has been mostly the product of my educational experience. Since I am pursuing an education in Business Management, I strongly deem that honesty, personal integrity, and good reputation are the things most valued in business partners. Therefore, I try to behave ethically in all situations for the reason that business and entrepreneurship should at all times maximize the benefit of the community and larger society.
As concerns my perspective on ethics’ application in thinking and decision-making, I believe that my focus on obligation is in accord with the main principles of deontological ethics. Deontology puts morality over the consequences of an action. Kant’s Categorical Imperative is one of the most vivid examples of deontological thinking since it establishes a universal moral standard for all the human being in all situations. Deontology relies on underlying moral principles that make an action permissible or not permissible.
I do not focus on the consequences of an action – decisions should be guided by moral principles that are absolute, not relative. When people apply the term ‘ethics,’ they usually have deontological ethics in mind, for the reason that ‘the imperative of self-reliance or non-parasitism also connects with the ‘deontological’ side of our ordinary moral thinking – with our obligations to keep promises, not to be deceptive, to tell the truth, etc. ’ (Darwall, 2002, p. 212).
I strongly believe that this definition of ethics should be remain the traditional one, and ethical behavior should be associated with people’s ability to fulfill their obligations. As concerns my experience with reconciling my ethical position with those of other people, I have always been encountering problem with that. While different ethical approaches focus on the morality of action and emphasize that people should act in a moral fashion, although they offer strikingly different approaches to measuring the morality of an action.
It is especially hard with the followers of consequentialism which holds that the rightness of an action entirely depends on the value of its consequences, that the usefulness can be rationally estimated, that there are no universal dogmas, and the rightness of every decision is evaluated by looking at its consequences. However, as a true deontologist, I believe that all humans have a sense of moral judgment, since moral agency is a part of our nature. For this reason, I always try to appeal to people’s moral judgment every time our perspectives seem to diverge too much.
Although every ethical perspective is right, and many real life situations can be resolved successfully using any ethical approach, there are some basic principles that must not be violated under any circumstances. If a person with a different ethical perspective attempts something unacceptable, I try to appeal to their deepest experiences of morality as a natural part of being human. Although I have not convinced anyone to change their ethical perspective by such means, I have succeeded in preventing several serious wrongdoings.
References
Darwall, S. (2002). Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.