Ethical reasoning and judgment refer to the methods in which persons determine whether a course of action or an attitude about an ethical issue is morally right by assessing a range of courses of action and taking into account ethical principles . Ethical reasoning is essential for moral decision making and behavior, and it represents the practice of judging what is morally right.
1.6.1. Ethical reasoning in decision-making
A decision is defined as a choice of action of what to do or not to do. These decisions are made to be able to achieve goals and they are based upon beliefs about …show more content…
The first type is the Consequentialists theories, which are primarily related to the ethical consequences of particular actions. These theories state that if the consequences are good, the action is right; if they are bad, the action is wrong. The Second type is the Non-Consequentialist theories, which consider the rightness or wrongness of an act, system of rules, etc. depends, at least in part, on something other than the goodness or badness of the consequences. Each of these categories contains varieties of approaches to ethics, some of which share characteristics across the …show more content…
Distributive Justice
From the Republic, written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, to a Theory of Justice, written by the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls. Under the distributive justice approach, it is examined whether or not the results produced by the action in question generate a reasonable distribution of benefits and costs. The morally correct action is the one that produces a fair distribution of benefits and costs for everyone who is affected by the action. Decision making and reasoning based on the theory of justice focus on the distributional effect of actions.
People constantly face ethical dilemmas and due to that it has never been clearly defined what good ethical behavior really is. Therefore, many problems and difficulties arise as a consequence. There has been a lot of criticism towards the use of utilitarianism and it has been argued that it needs to be changed. It is the increasing concern about individual rights in society as well as in businesses that is the main reason for developing ethical standards that are based on non-utilitarian criteria. Individuals in organizations are increasingly finding themselves facing ethical dilemmas where they are required to define what is right and wrong behavior. It has been argued that in order to be able to increase ethics in businesses around the world, there is a need for identifying and developing common ethics regulations. This is because some ethical dilemmas in one country might not be seen as