Personal Ethics Reflective Report

For majority of my life, my personal ethics revolved around a utilitarian point of view where I prioritized having the best outcomes over moral values. However, one day I learned that when making decisions that involve people aside from yourself, personal view of ethics has to branch out to accommodate the ethical values of more than one person. My view in ethics changed in high school when I had to choose between the grade of myself and others. Within the time span of 1 week, I had a group project in Spanish involving a large fraction of my final grade in addition to a research project in English. This created a situation where I had to sacrifice one task in order to do better in another, however this decision would not only affect me, but also other team members.

Through my old perspective of ethics, I believed that the best outcome would result from taking advantage of my team to complete the Spanish project while focusing on my English research project. This decision didn’t feel honest to me, but …show more content…
Even if I was justified to take advantage of the group, they might sacrifice the Spanish group project which would affect me in return. This caused a stalemate in my utilitarian point of view. However, group ethics are not always about the utilitarian point of view, so I decided to take a look at moral values in my decision making process instead of consequences. The most commonly associated moral values with teamwork are cooperation and integrity. Even if I was doing all the work, the entire team including me were at fault for not cooperating with each other and keeping integrity in the work. The best approach to this decision making process was to address the moral flaws with my group and then work on improving it. If the team was to cooperate, we could create a compromised decision rather than plainly taking advantage of each