What do we mean when we talk about ethics?

By Miriam Schulman

The minute we put the word should in a sentence, we are probably talking about ethics. Colleges should (or should not) take race into account in admissions. Health care coverage should (or should not) be a substantial part of the state budget.

Kirk O. Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, says, "Ethics is the careful study of standards of behavior that apply to real-world problems and decisions. It gives us insights into what we should do."

This column, which begins today, will deal with the ethical dimensions of issues in the news. The commentators—Markkula Ethics Center staff, scholars and members of our advisory board—will not decree the right thing to do. Instead, they will explain how they use ethical reasoning to arrive at their positions.

Although ethics deals with right and wrong, it is not a discipline that always leads everyone to the same conclusions. It is not the captive of liberals or conservatives.

Of course, there are situations that are wrong by any standard. The recently reported use of Los Alamos Lab purchase orders to buy fishing gear for employees is what moral philosophers might call "low-lying fruit."

But there are other issues where right and wrong are less clear. To guide our reflection on such difficult questions, philosophers, religious teachers and other thinkers have shaped various approaches to ethical decision making.

There's the utilitarian approach: Which option will do the most good and the least harm for the most people? You can see this analysis at work in discussions of smallpox vaccinations for health care workers or for all Americans. Is the risk of a terrorist attack with smallpox serious enough to justify the risk of adverse reactions to the vaccination itself?

The social justice approach asks what's fair to all stakeholders. This question is always at the heart of discussions about affirmative action, a debate that resurfaced with the Supreme Court's decision to hear a case challenging race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Michigan.

President Bush weighed in against the program, which he likened to a "quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based solely on their race." But, argues June Carbone, SCU of law, it's also unfair if "the use of narrow academic criteria results in wholesale exclusion by race or socioeconomic class."

The rights approach focuses on the legitimate claims we make on each other, such as life and liberty. One current rights question is, Can cybercriminals be prevented from using the Internet once they have served their sentences? Courts in different areas of the country have disagreed about whether the Internet has become so integral to daily life that restricting access is too great an infringement on the ex-convicts' liberty.

We can also pursue the common good-what the philosopher John Rawls described as "certain general conditions that are...equally to everyone's advantage." The debate over the state budget is really a way of asking which services and infrastructure are the most crucial "general conditions" necessary for our common life.

Finally, the virtue approach asks whether any given action demonstrates human behavior at its best, displaying compassion, courage, honesty or other ideals? These virtues-or the lack of them-are bound to come up this week when the World Economic Forum holds its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Prompted by global corporate scandals, the WEF is going to look at the decline in trust and values.

Consciously thinking through these ethical approaches can improve our understanding and our decisions. But it doesn't guarantee unambiguous answers. It's possible that the choice suggested by one approach may conflict with that suggested by another.

Each person may weigh the ethical arguments differently. But a systematic approach can clarify complex situations and help us come to an answer that represents people striving to be their best.

Miriam Schulman is communications director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. We invite your responses to the issues raised by this column at www.scu.edu/speakingofethics. This article originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on January 26, 2003.

Questions:

1. Can recent corporate scandals be traced to lapses in CEO virtue, or are the problems systemic?
2. Is health care an integral part of the common good, and should it be provided by the market, states, or the federal government?
3. What is the fair thing to do about the representation of minorities on US college campuses?

For more ethical perspectives, click here.