Defining Ethics

David B. Resnik explains ethics like this:

When most people think of ethics (or morals), they think of rules for distinguishing between right and wrong, such as the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"), a code of professional conduct like the Hippocratic Oath ("First of all, do no harm"), a religious creed like the Ten Commandments ("Thou Shalt not kill..."), or a wise aphorisms like the sayings of Confucius. This is the most common way of defining "ethics": ethics are norms for conduct that distinguish between or acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

Ethics can also be thought of as the personal code of conduct we each adopt through which we govern our own behavior. We might shape our own ethics based on religious beliefs and/or social norms, but we do make personal ethical choices each day as we decide how to conduct our jobs, how to treat the people around us, and which activities to engage in or abstain from based on a sense of right and wrong.

Sometimes ethical choices are very clear. We can all agree that hurting other people is wrong. If someone stood up during a meeting and suddenly punched another person in the room for no reason, there would be easy and general consensus that the behavior was wrong.

If someone sent a text message while another person was speaking during a meeting, we would move into murkier ground. Some might consider the behavior rude or ill-advised but wouldn't go so far as to say it was unethical. Others might believe it was clearly wrong, and still others wouldn't see a problem with it at all, or would perhaps want to know more details about the urgency of the text message before deciding.

Maybe the text messaging scenario would be judged differently by people of different ages or people of different cultures. Maybe it would be judged differently by people who stay connected to their livelihoods through text messaging and those who don't.

Regardless, what we can know is that rapidly changing technology brings about new ethical questions almost faster than we can process them. In this class, we're going to examine some of those questions as we research and consider varying ways to approach them.