The Ethics Triad

This week focused on individual approaches to ethics, and we learned about something called the “ethics triad.”  It focused on three different aspects that need to be considered when analyzing an ethical dilemma.  The three aspects are the results-based approach, the duty-based approach, and virtue ethics (Bowman & West, 2015).  When reading about these three schools of thought, it made me realize that I typically make decisions based on one singular aspect, alone, as opposed to thinking through the situation in its entirety; I definitely will be approaching ethical decisions differently now that I have read about these three specific concepts to think through when making a critical decision. Let me give you an example so you understand what I am talking about.  I watched a movie called “The Experiment” this week, which was based on events from the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, and this movie left me wondering if this experiment should have ever been conducted.  I question the ethics behind it because while studies, such as this particular one, provided detailed insight into human behavioral aspects, one must consider the cost that was involved in obtaining such information.  If a study leaves residual effects on the people involved, then many people would argue that the study was unethical because it psychologically damaged the participants.  

If you have not see the movie that I am referring to, here is the trailer for it:

I am going to examine this dilemma by utilizing the ethics triad.   Based on the results-approach, a person needs to determine if the decision will benefit the greater good (Bowman & West, 2015).  On one hand, the information obtained from the study can be used to make advances in the psychology field, and it can help researchers understand why people behave the way that they do.  On the other hand, the people involved in the study may regret that they were part of the study because it could reveal aspects about themselves that they may have trouble living with.  Based on the two sides of this coin, I believe that the study would benefit more people than it would harm, so based on the results-approach, the study is acceptable.  Now I will move to the second school of thought: the duty-based approach.  Within this approach, a person must consider if laws were followed when deciding to conduct this study and if it was universally accepted (Bowman & West, 2015).  At the time of the study, I believe that the no laws were broken; however, shortly after this study was conducted, institutional review boards were established in an effort to protect human subjects by subjecting studies to ethical reviews prior to initiation.  I think that prior to the study, the prisoner/guard concept would have been universally accepted; however, after the study is when the questions arose.  Based on the duty-approach considerations in order to conduct the study, I believe that it supports the decision to initiate the experiment.  Based on virtue ethics and how a person of integrity would handle this decision, I believe that a person of integrity would have a difficult time treating innocent people as prisoners and possibly inflicting psychological damage to them in the name of research, despite the fact that the conclusions drawn might be able to help advance the field of psychology.  So based on this school of thought, I do not believe that the decision to conduct this study was an ethical one. 

In order to fully understand how the ethics triad works, one must consider all three schools of thought to see the “bigger picture” and to make the best decision with all of the factors included.  The first two schools of thought indicate that this study was ethical, but the third school of thought raises ethical concerns.  If a person goes with the “majority rules” mentality, then two out of three wins and the answer would be to conduct the study.  However, another approach to handling a situation with the ethics triad would be to only go through with a decision if the answer was a unanimous “yes” to all three approaches; this would leave no room for doubt that the decision was, in fact, ethical.  This is where personal beliefs enter the picture because there is not a strict guideline on how a person should handle a situation like this.  The bottom line is that people need to consider ethical dilemmas from multiple aspects, as opposed to just a singular one, to fully analyze the dilemma at hand.

Now that I have thoroughly explained the ethics triad to you, think back to a decision where you had to make a tough call and could have utilized this triad to help make your decision clearer.  Did you make the right call based on the ethics triad?  Feel free to post your questions or thoughts in the comments section below.  Have a great week, and thank you for visiting my blog! 

                                                                  References:

Bowman, J.S. and West, J. P. (2015).  Public service ethics: Individual and 
        institutional responsibilities. Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press.

Monsters and Men

Hello again. Welcome back to my blog! 

I went to see the movie “American Sniper” in the theater this week, and overall I thought it was a great, albeit stressful, movie.  The movie was in English, but it had Korean subtitles because I watched it in South Korea. It was based on a true story, and Bradley Cooper played Chris Kyle, who was a Navy Seal with four tours in Iraq as a sniper.  The movie showed the ethical dilemmas that Chris faced when he was doing his job in Iraq, especially when women and children were the ones who had weapons to be used against the U.S. military.  There was one scene in the movie where a little boy, who could not have been older than seven or eight years old, picked up a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) and attempted to aim it at one of the U.S. military vehicles.  He was very unstable with the RPG; nevertheless, Chris kept his eye on the little boy, but he was praying that the boy would drop the RPG and not force him to take action.  Thankfully the boy did drop it and ran away, leaving Chris to let out a huge sigh of relief because he absolutely did not want to shoot this little boy.  It was obvious by the way that Chris was portrayed that he did not want to kill anyone, and at one point he even said that “the legend,” which is what people referred to him as, was not a good nickname to earn.  He claimed that he did what he had to do in order to protect his men, but the movie did not portray him as ever bragging about his kills in any way.  When talking about ethical issues, killing is almost always one topic that people mention.  Is killing ever morally justified?  Chris Kyle had to make several extremely tough decisions in the scenarios in the movie; had he not taken the shots to stop the enemy, then the enemy would have killed his fellow Americans.  In these scenarios, he was killing defensively, not offensively.  He was killing the people who were on a mission to end the lives of others.  I highly recommend this movie if you have not see it yet, and then I would love to hear what you think about his ethical dilemmas.

This week I also watched a movie called “Changing Lanes” where ethical issues were rampant throughout the movie.  If you have not seen this movie, I recommend that you watch it, as well!  Ben Affleck and Samuel Jackson play the two main characters, and to give a brief summary of the movie, they are at odds with one another over the aftermath of a crash that caused both of their days to tumble in a downward spiral.  This movie shows how deceitful actions can snowball, continuing to grow larger and larger, until the situation is completely out of control.  Anyone who has ever been in a situation like this knows that it is easy to lose sight of which direction is up when you are in a spiral.  I think that watching movies that bring ethical issues to light is a good way that we can reflect on how we would act if we were to ever find ourselves in a similar scenario.

In my graduate course this week we started learning about individual approaches to ethics.  I read in my textbook about two famous experiments, Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and Milgram’s shock experiment, and Bowman and West (2015) concluded that “evil is done not only by monsters, but at least as frequently by normal people put in terrible circumstances” (p. 66).  This sentence resonated within me because if we lived in a “black and white” world, only monsters would do evil; however, we know that this is not the case because good people sometimes do bad things.  Anyone, when faced with a terrible situation, is capable of engaging in unethical actions.  The key, then, is to try and find ways to avoid these pitfalls.  I think that the main way that a person can attempt to do this is by recognizing that there is an issue in the first place.  Of course there are other steps, as well, but one must first identify the issue in order to take any further actions to fix it.  These topics made me think of the hypothetical question that most of us have been asked at one point or another, which is how a person would behave if they were invisible.  Would that person spy on someone?  Would that person do good deeds for strangers?  Would that person steal money?  The possibilities are endless, but the question remains the same: would an invisible person act ethically, even though nobody is watching?

As always, thank you for visiting my blog.  I will be back again next week!  Please leave any comments or questions that you may have in the section below.

                                                                         
                                                                         References:

Bowman, J.S. and West, J. P. (2015).  Public service ethics: Individual and 
        institutional responsibilities. Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press.

No "Right" Answer

Hello again!  This week was full of ethical dilemmas!  Before you worry about my emotional state as I write this, I should mention that these were in the form of journal article reviews, and not personal problems, thankfully.  In my graduate course we were instructed to find current research on ethical topics and to post our reviews on the discussion board so that we could discuss them as a class.  Some of the topics that people chose were extremely interesting! 

I think the topic that hit closest to home for me was an article that examined the burnout rate of military healthcare providers.  I am not a military healthcare provider, but I do work at a substance abuse clinic on post where we are very short-staffed with counselors at the moment.  Unfortunately, our counselors are starting to feel the effects of burnout.  In this particular article, the correlation between leave days and an increased burnout rate were shown to have a direct relationship, with the more leave days that a person accrued, the higher the chance that they would reach burnout.  This makes sense to me because if a person does not ever take time off work to “recharge their batteries,” then how will they ever be able to function at 100%?  The military community in South Korea is very unique because of the rapid turnover rate for positions.  Many Soldiers are only stationed in Korea for one year, and then they are off to their new duty stations.  Civilians, like myself, are only allowed to stay for a maximum of five years before it is time to move to the next place.  It sometimes takes months, even a year, to fill a civilian position because of the specifications that have to be met in order to fill the positions.  This results in positions sitting vacant for excessive periods of time, and burnout can (and does) occur because others are trying to pick up the slack.  The ethical dilemma that arises out of this is that healthcare providers, while providing for others, need to take care of themselves—but at what cost?  Should they be forced to use up their vacation days (“use or lose”), even though they feel that they are neglecting patient care while they are gone?  Or should they take vacation, and try not to worry what will happen to their patients while they are away?  It creates an ethical dilemma, for sure, and it is one that is not easily solved.

Another extremely interesting topic from the article reviews this week focused on the ethics of torture in the War on Terrorism.  The questions remains: is torture ever morally justified?  We could go a step further and ask: is killing ever morally justified?  These questions are not easily answerable—at least not for me.  I believe that most things are situational, and I would have to know the absolute specifics to even speculate on my answers to those questions; nevertheless, they would be ethical dilemmas, indeed!

I watched a TED Talk video this week that involved animals and morality, and I found it incredibly interesting and enlightening.  I encourage everyone reading this post to watch it, as well.  It can be found here: http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button__2015-01-12.  There were many aspects that I found to be enlightening, but the most noteworthy was Frans de Waal’s notion of the two morality pillars.  He mentioned that reciprocity and fairness were underneath one pillar, and empathy and compassion were under the other.  While I am unsure if morality is truly founded with these two pillars, it definitely made me stop for a minute and evaluate my current notion of how society operates.

While I have never seen the entire movie of “Beetlejuice,” I did watch a clip this week that showed the afterlife, and strangely enough, it displayed public administration NOT at its finest!  I am shocked at the fact that in the movie, it was people who committed suicide who were sentenced to fulfill disgruntled public administrator’s roles for all of eternity.  What a way to inaccurately portray public administrators!  I like to believe that the majority of public administrators are in their positions because they have a passion for making the world a better place.  Maybe I am looking through a pair of rose-colored glasses, but I cannot help but feel that way.  It really is a sad fact that there can be a hundred people doing the “right” thing and trying to improve policies and programs for people, but it only takes one person to undo that all.  That one person then becomes the face of the field, and as a result, public administrators get a poor reputation.  So, how can we overcome this?  I think that one way that we can try is to be diligent in spreading the “good” news and our success stories.  I realize that scandals and human error makes for exciting entertainment; however, it is really taking a toll on the way that public administrators are perceived. 

Well, I would like to thank you for visiting my blog!  I hope your week was not riddled with ethical dilemmas, but in the chance that it was (or perhaps you just read about them like I did), please feel free to share them on the comments below!  Thank you! 

Black or White: I See Grey

Hello everyone!  My name is Angela, and I would like to welcome you to my blog.  I am a graduate student through Troy University, and I am currently working toward my Master of Public Administration.  I am starting this blog to take a closer look at ethical dilemmas and issues that arise within public administration.  I live in South Korea with my husband, and we both work on the military installation.  I am a Department of the Army Civilian and he is Active Duty.

Ethics is one of my favorite subjects to discuss because there is not always a clearly defined "right" and "wrong" answer to the question at hand.  Instead of viewing choices as simply "black or white," we really need to consider the "grey" possibilities.  Society undoubtedly has its own set of norms that people adhere to, but when a topic concerning an ethical dilemma gets brought to the table, debates often ensue.  I enjoy a good debate, and I look forward to challenging comments that really make me think about my own beliefs.  I am on a journey to figure out how to act in the utmost ethical manner, especially in a leadership role.  So let's get started.

This week our assigned readings covered the foundations that coincide with ethics in public administration.  This touched on everything from the relevance of ethics to the "poppycock" of it all (if you're as unfamiliar with that term as I was, it simply refers to the myths that are associated with ethics).  In the upcoming weeks I will be discussing the individual and the institutional ethical approaches, as well as the dilemmas that arise from them.  To wrap the blog up, I will be discussing the key issues that I find within public service.  I plan on supplementing those with actual scenarios that I encounter in regards to ethical dilemmas, as well as ethical issues in movies that I watch throughout the next few months. 

At work this week I received an email that stated that everyone had to comply with the attached "Living the Army Ethic: Why & How We Serve" training.  How convenient for this topic, right?  The Army pushes out trainings on a regular basis, so this was nothing new, but the fact that this week’s training was on ethics definitely peaked my interest.  Anyway, the training consisted of opening the attachment, and clicking on the link that was provided to watch a short video on why we serve.  Ethics truly do have a valuable place in everything that we do.  If you would like to check out the video, here is the link: http://cape.army.mil/videos/living-the-army-ethic-why-and-how-we-serve. 

This week in my graduate course we were instructed to take a philosopher quiz to determine which philosopher we identify with most.  I was hoping that I would get a well-known, influential philosopher as my match--such as Socrates or Plato.  That was not the case, though.  Instead, I was matched with someone who I had never heard of before: Nel Noddings.  It turns out, though, that she is actually quite fascinating.  She is like the Mother Teresa of the philosophy world.  I say that because her philosophy is primarily about helping and caring for people!  How does that relate to me?  Well, I have always thought of myself as a "helpful" person, and I like to take care of people.  Is it wrong of me to admit that I like it when my husband is not feeling well because I get to take care of him?  Sorry, Kyle!  That is just it, though: I love being able to help people when they need it!  It is almost like I was born with this burning desire inside me to be a life-long helper to anyone in need, or was this something that I have learned to be over the years?

That brings me to my next question concerning the long-standing “nature versus nurture” debate.  Where do you stand on this topic?  I have positioned myself pretty firmly on the "nurture" side, and I believe that ethics and morals are the result of societal influences and interactions, as opposed to purely nature.  Sure, genetics may have something to do with it.  I am not eliminating that possibility.  However, I think it is undeniable that nurture plays the more significant role.  I would be interested to hear what you think on this debate!

If you found my page through a roundabout manner, here is the URL in case you would like to come back for future posts: www.ACloserLookAtEthics.blogspot.com.  Please feel free to leave comments and debate the ethical topics with me.  I will be updating my blog every week.  Thank you for visiting my site!