Ethical Frameworks

Ethical decision-making requires: Issues that impact others An agent’s conscious choice of means and ends Standards of right and wrong

Ethical decisions are characterized by: Function of reason Reflection of character Conflict between freedom and duty

Kantian ‘‘Act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.” (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 429) “Act in accordance with a maxim of ends that it can be a universal law for everyone to have.” (Metaphysics of Morals, p. 395)

Utilitarian ‘‘The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness’’ (On liberty and other essays, p. 137) Justice is a name for certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation, than any others, though particular cases may in which some other social duty is so important, as to overrule any one of the general maxims of justice. Thus to save a life, it may not only be allowable, but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the necessary food or medicine, or to kidnap, and compel to officiate the only qualified medical practitioner. (p. 201)

Scientific norms: Universalism Communality Disinterestedness Organized skepticism Originality Humility Scientific counter-norms: Particularism Solitariness Interestedness Organized dogma “Salami slicing” Self-promotion