Moral Decision Making See, Judge, Act, Evaluate

When faced with any decision We must go through a decision making process Sometimes that process is carefully thought out Sometimes we go through it without thinking about it

Either way, the process involves four basic steps: Seeing Judging Acting Evaluating

Seeing Who will this decision affect? Is this a moral decision? Does this decision have anything to do with loving God, loving myself, or loving others? Ask God to help us see with loving eyes.

Judging Analyze all options and evaluate which options would truly be a loving choice. Judging means calling on our conscience, and considering what the Bible says, what the Church teaches and our parents too.

To judge well we must listen to the voice of God speaking in our hearts.

Acting Deciding to do the loving thing and then doing it. It is important to ask God to help us put our decisions into action.

Evaluating We must be aware of how that decision has affected our relationships with God, with ourselves and with others. We must empathize with others, be able to put ourselves into their shoes.

The Examen of Conscience Evaluating all of the decisions we made during the day through prayer. This will keep us closely connected with God.

The Examen During the examen, or prayerful review of our day, we go back over our day and our choices, we try to see how God was guiding us and speaking to us through those choices.

We must ask ourselves if we listened to God or if we turned away from God.

Three Principles We must never do evil even for the sake of accomplishing something good We should always treat others with the same love and respect with which we wish to be treated. Everything we do should reflect genuine concern for other people.

Read “Caught in the Act” as a class (text page 81) Answer the accompanying questions to the story “Caught in the Act” Work with a partner on the “Case Studies” Assignment Each partner must read the case study and evaluate how the person involved used the See Judge Act evaluate model as well as how careful they were to form their conscience.