A common enough sentiment of the current era is that as long as something is not illegal then it is acceptable behavior, but this is not the case. Unethical behavior, while not necessarily illegally (yet) is still wrong and can have a detrimental affect on a person professionally as well as personally. For instance, the new healthcare reforms are proposing penalties for those companies that do not provide healthcare benefits to their full-time employees. Some companies are considering paying the penalties rather than insuring their employees, “a document prepared for Verizon by consulting firm Hewitt Resources stated, ‘Even though the proposed assessments [on companies that do not provide health care] are material, they are modest when compared to the average cost of health care,’ and that to avoid costs and regulations, ‘employers may consider exiting the health care market and send employees to the Exchanges.’ (Under the new bill, employees who lose their coverage will purchase health care through state-run exchanges.)” (Tully, 2010). The threat of public backlash against such unethical business practices will hopefully mitigate the number of employers that actually take this route.
Ethics are complex standards of demeanor. Ethics can be personal or very broad. The rules by which an individual wishes to determine his or her carriage are personal ethics. The guidelines to which a group (religion, nation, et cetera) holds itself and each of its members accountable are community or global ethics. In the case of global ethics some consider all ethical principles to have evolved from our instinctive ethics. For example it would go against natural instincts in our species to abandon our children because humans produce so few offspring; raising children increases the chances of the community’s survival.
Another example of instinctive ethics might be found in Sagan and Druyan’s book which discusses a group of macaque monkeys that demonstrated the willingness to sacrifice rather than cause pain or suffering to another macaque monkey. In this experiment “[M]acaques were fed if they were willing to pull a chain and electrically shock an unrelated macaque whose agony was in plain view through a one-way mirror. Otherwise, they starved. […] 87% preferred to go hungry,” scientists reported (Sagan & Druyan, 1993). Humans repress these instincts in favor of learned habits or else people flounder when faced with a much more subtle ethical dilemma. The macaque monkeys instinctively valued the well-being of other living creatures above the basic need for food.
Values are more like ideals and they may vary both in what is considered valuable and in the importance and priority of each value. Values are ideals rather than rules and how much they can vary, even among two people who believe they have similar values. This difference may often be caused by the difference between instrumental values and intrinsic values. For one person family may be a value that is an intrinsic value, or valuable on its own, and the value of money may be an instrumental value. In that case money is valuable because it allows that person to afford to have a family and not for the sake of having money.
Understanding the ethical guidelines and the importance and priority of values can make navigate the pitfalls of life a bit easier.
References
Sagan, C., & Druyan, A. (1993). Shadows of forgotten ancestors. New York, NY: The Random House Publishing Group.
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