ethics in our daily life essay

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Right and Wrong in the Real World

Some years ago, a student asked to see me during office hours to talk about a personal problem that, she assured me, related to our recent ethics class. It seemed she was having difficulties with a new friend from the Dominican Republic. She explained that in normal circumstances she would have ended the relationship, but she was reluctant to do so now because of affirmative action.

“I’m convinced by the arguments and decided it would be wrong to demand the same standards from this girl as I do from my other friends,” she said. I, of course, immediately commented on how this was condescending and then pointed out that governmental and institutional policies don’t readily apply to our personal relationships.

“But why not?” she pressed. “If it’s a good moral argument, shouldn’t it apply to my own life?”

My student’s sensitivities were surely misplaced, but explaining why isn’t quite so easy. In fact, they reflect the complex relationship between communal and personal ethics, between moral theory and our everyday ethical decisions. These aren’t idle ruminations: How we understand these connections is critical to understanding the moral quality of our lives. This is the realm of everyday ethics.

Now would certainly seem to be the time to care more about everyday ethics. We regularly complain about the moral decay of our age, and we have good reason to do so. Ethical misconduct is a mainstay of the news: CEOs raiding corporate coffers, widespread auditing fraud, unbridled cheating in school, scientists doctoring data, reporters lying about sources, politicians still acting like politicians—the incidence and variety of transgressions seem interminable. No wonder that in a recent Gallup Poll , nearly 80 percent of Americans rated the overall state of morality in the United States as fair or poor. Even more troubling is the widely held opinion that people are becoming more selfish and dishonest. According to that same Gallup Poll, 77 percent of Americans believe that the state of moral values is getting worse. This perception of decaying values—accurate or not—has its own adverse consequences: It lowers our expectations for other people’s behavior and leads us to tolerate unethical actions. For example, in a National Business Survey conducted in October of 2005, a majority of workers claimed to have observed ethical misconduct in the workplace, roughly the same number as reported misconduct in the 2003 survey, but the number of employees who bothered reporting those transgressions fell by 10 percentage points.

But should these findings surprise us? Isn’t wrongdoing just part of “the human condition”? Can we really teach our children to be more ethical? Or improve ourselves when we are adults? Moreover, when it comes to our personal interactions, who decides—and how—what is or isn’t moral?

These are difficult but not rhetorical questions. To address them, we need to get a better sense of what we mean by “everyday ethics” and where it fits into the larger picture of morality.

What is everyday ethics?

• The ATM spits out an extra $100 in your favor. Keep the money and your mouth shut?

• At a restaurant you notice your friend’s wife engaged in some serious flirting with another man. Tell your friend—and possibly ruin his marriage—or mind your own business?

• You can avail yourself of a free wireless connection by accessing the account of your next-door neighbor. Silly not to? 

• Your colleague is forever taking credit for your and other people’s work. Is it okay to exact a little revenge and for once take credit for her labors?

• Your friend is on her way out the door for a significant date and asks whether you like her blouse. Do you tell her the truth: It’s hideous?

• Is it all right to laugh at a sexist joke?

We face choices like these daily: morally laden quandaries that demand direct and immediate decisions. Unlike moral issues that dominate our dinner conversations—legalizing abortion, preemptive war, raising the minimum wage—about which we do little more than pontificate, the problems of everyday ethics call for our own resolutions. But how do we arrive at our judgments? For example, in answering the questions above, do you have a quick, intuitive response about what is proper, or do you consider broader moral principles and then derive a solution? 

The history of philosophy is filled with competing theories that offer such moral principles—for example, there’s theological ethics, which looks to religious sources for moral guidance ( see sidebar ); consequentialist theories, which judge the moral value of an act by its results; rational, rule-based theories, such as proposed by Immanuel Kant , which argue that proper intentions are essential to moral value; and virtue-based theories, which focus more on character than on behavior.

But when your teenager asks if you ever did drugs, it’s unlikely that you’ll undertake a complex utilitarian calculus or work out the details of how a categorical imperative would apply in this case. In fact, in dealing with so many of our everyday moral challenges, it is difficult to see just how one would implement the principles of a moral theory. No wonder that many moral philosophers insist they have no more to say about these specific situations than a theoretical physicist does when confronting a faulty spark plug. Nonetheless, your response to your curious teenager, as with all cases in the domain of everyday ethics, presents a practical, immediate moral challenge that you cannot avoid.

Embracing the moral importance of these ordinary dilemmas, some ethicists have posited a bottom-up perspective of ethical decision making that places these “mundane,” ordinary human interactions at the very heart of moral philosophy.

According to this view, because traditional moral theories can’t reach down to our routine lives, we should question their practical value. Take, for example, the “demand for impartiality,” the notion, common to many moral theories, that we treat everyone the same. But of course we don’t—nor should we. Suppose you spend three hours at the bedside of your sick spouse and then declare, “Hey, you know I would do the same for anyone. It’s my moral duty.” Don’t expect your spouse to be delighted with your righteousness. Caring for a loved one because of a moral principle is, as the philosopher Bernard Williams said, “one reason too many.”

Other philosophers are uneasy with the moral ideal posited in mainstream theories; not only is the theoretical idea of moral perfection unattainable, it’s not even desirable. After all, who wants to hang out and grab a beer with a moral saint? Indeed, who wants to be the kind of person who never hangs out and has a beer because of more pressing moral tasks? Still other critics note that typical academic moral arguments ignore the complexity and texture of our ordinary lives. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum and others suggest, an observant novel will often be more instructive about our moral lives than an academic treatise. 

Well, if we don’t appeal to moral theories when deciding problems of everyday ethics, how then do we make these decisions? 

At the outset, we need to recognize—and take seriously—the difficulties inherent in these judgments. The interesting ethical questions aren’t those that offer a choice between good and evil—that’s easy—but pit good versus good, or bad versus even worse. Take, for example, the case of our friend walking out the door wearing that unappealing blouse on her way to a crucial date. She asks for your opinion on her attire. Honesty demands you to tell her the truth, but compassion urges you to give her the thumbs up. It’s worth noticing that other values, say friendship, surely should count here… but how? Perhaps one ought to be more truthful to a friend than a stranger, but then, too, one ought to be especially encouraging to a friend. Appealing to clear-cut moral principles such as “Do unto others as you have them do unto you” isn’t decisive here, either: Do you want to be told the truth in this case?

Presumably, different people might offer different answers.

We can, nonetheless, draw a few lessons from even this hasty consideration of everyday moral dilemmas.

One: We need to be clear about which values are at play. While we often don’t have the luxury of a long, careful weighing of competing principles, our actions will be moral only if they are the firm result of our intention to act morally and not, say, to fulfill a selfish interest.

Two: Intellectual honesty is always a challenge. With regard to lying, for example, we need to acknowledge how easy it is to justify dishonesty by claiming compassion or some other good when, in fact, we merely want to avoid unpleasant confrontations. Our capacity for rationalization is remarkable: “Everyone does it,” “I’ll do it just this one time,” “It’s for her own good,” “It’s none of my business,” and on and on.

Three: We need to give slack to people with whom we disagree. Inasmuch as the problems posed by everyday ethics are genuine dilemmas but do not allow the luxury of lengthy, careful analysis, decent people for decent reasons can reach opposing conclusions. 

But how then do we make our quick judgments about what to do in these everyday moral situations? What’s going on in our minds?

The science of everyday ethics

Over the past few years, evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, and cognitive psychologists have been exploring these very questions. And they are making some startling discoveries. 

For example, using functional MRI (fMRI) scans of the brain, neuropsychologist Joshua Greene has found that different types of moral choices stimulate different areas of the brain. His findings present an astonishing challenge to the way we usually approach moral decisions.

Consider, for example, a popular thought experiment posed by moral philosophers: the “trolley-car” cases. Suppose you are the driver of a runaway trolley car that is approaching five men working on the track. As you speed down toward this tragedy, you realize you can divert the train to a side track and thereby kill only one person who is working on that other track. What do you do?

Now consider an alternative case: Suppose you aren’t the train conductor but are standing on a cliff watching the train careen toward the endangered five people. Next to you is a fat person whose sheer bulk could stop the oncoming trolley. Should you give him a shove so that he’ll fall onto the track and be killed by the train—but in the process, you’d save five other lives?

Most people say they would save the five lives in case one, but not in case two—and offer complicated reasons for their choices. What Greene found in his research was that different parts of our brains are at work when we consider these two different scenarios. In the first case, the area associated with the emotions remains quiet—we are just calculating—but in the second case, which asks us to imagine actually killing someone up close and personally, albeit to save five other people, the emotional area of the brain lights up. In Greene’s view, this suggests that we bring to our moral judgments predilections that are hard-wired in our brains, and emotions might play a more significant role in our decision making than we realize, particularly in the case of everyday ethical dilemmas that affect us personally.

Brain research of this kind underscores the claims of evolutionary psychologists who maintain that many of our moral attitudes are grounded in our genetic history. They suggest, as does Greene, that because we evolved in small groups, unaware of people living halfway around the world, we have stronger instinctive moral reactions to problems that affect us directly than to those that are more abstract. In this view, for example, evolutionary strategy dictates our preferences for kin over strangers, and makes us more likely to display altruism toward people we can see first-hand.

Cognitive psychologists, for their part, are examining how moral decisions are formed—demonstrating, for example, how selective images, such as pictures of starving children, can alter and enlarge our sphere of empathy, and how social environments can either stultify or nurture compassion. 

Many warn against seeing a “science of ethics” as the ultimate arena for the study of moral decision making. They remind us that our pre-set inclinations—how we are—do not prescribe or justify how we ought to be.

But this ongoing research is of vital importance to our understanding of ethics, and in particular, everyday ethics. In the first place, we will better acknowledge the constraints we battle in acting “against our natures.” For example, if evolutionary psychologists are right and our ethical decisions are informed by an evolutionary preference for those in our immediate group, we can better understand why it takes such an effort to get people to spend their money on the poor of Africa rather than on another pair of ice skates for their kids, or to respect members of other cultures as they do their own. Moreover, this research can be extremely helpful as we determine how best to teach ethics to our children. Indeed, studies of the brain and our genome might shed light on how it is that some individuals turn out decent and caring and others cold and obnoxious.

The challenges of everyday ethics

All this data cannot, however, answer our fundamental challenge: How should we act and what kind of people should we strive to be? As we’ve seen, we cannot rely on rarified moral theories to help us deal with the pressing demands of everyday ethics. Nor can we rely on our biological dispositions to point us toward the best ethical judgments. Rather, we have to confront the integrity of our character, our honed intuitions, our developed sense of fairness and honesty. And to see how these traits are exhibited, we need to see how they work in action. 

The articles in the rest of this issue do just that. This is how ethics gets played in the classroom, at work, at the supermarket, over the dinner table. While the usual moral evaluations of societies tend to focus on such broad issues as crime, economic equity, and foreign policy, just as important to consider is the moral health of our everyday interactions. For after all, this is how our lives are lived: day by day, one “small” moral judgment after another. 

About the Author

Joshua halberstam.

Joshua Halberstam, Ph.D., is the author of Everyday Ethics: Inspired Solutions to Moral Dilemmas (Viking) and is currently an adjunct professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. In addition to his professional writings in philosophy, he has written several books for the general reader on the subjects of ethics and culture.

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The learning network | do the right thing: making ethical decisions in everyday life.

Do The Right Thing: Making Ethical Decisions in Everyday Life

Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

• See all in Civics »
• See all lesson plans »

Overview | Something happens — a moment of injustice, a threat to the nation, a potentially criminal act. Why do some people speak out or take action, while others remain silent? And how can we encourage more people to recognize the moment when bravery is required?

In this lesson, we explore ethical dilemmas that face normal people around the world, in all walks of life. Some of their cases are familiar, while others are obscure. But they hold one thing in common: They feature individuals who followed the guidance of their own moral code, often risking personal injury or community censure to do so. We’ll ask students to examine the underlying characteristics of such episodes, and consider whether some acts are more deserving of support than others.

Warm-Up | You may wish to begin by tapping into students’ existing experiences and beliefs. Ask students to jot down some examples of people who spoke out against injustice, took a lone public stand, intervened during an emergency or controversy, or failed to do so. You can also ask if they themselves have ever stood up for what’s right, even in a difficult situation. Pick a few particularly compelling examples and ask students, as a class, to suggest what motivated each individual’s actions and speculate on the thoughts that went through that person’s mind at the crucial moment. Then, by a show of hands, ask students whether they approve or disapprove of the action that was taken in each case.

Related | In the story “The Whistle-Blower’s Quandary,” researchers at Northwestern University and Boston College studied people’s reactions to a variety of ethical dilemmas.

Imagine you’re thinking about blowing the whistle on your employer. As the impassioned responses to the actions of whistle-blowers like Edward J. Snowden have reminded us, you face a moral quandary: Is reporting misdeeds an act of heroism or betrayal?… In one study, we asked a group of 74 research participants to write a paragraph about an occasion when they witnessed unethical behavior and reported it (and why), and we asked another group, of 61 participants, to write about an occasion when they witnessed unethical behavior and kept their mouths shut. We found that the whistle-blowers used 10 times as many terms related to fairness and justice, whereas non-whistle-blowers used twice as many terms related to loyalty.

Read or summarize the entire article with your class. You may wish to introduce students to the following words or concepts before reading: whistle-blower, social psychology, moral quandary, unethical behavior, government contractor.

Questions | For reading comprehension and discussion:

• Why might people disagree over whether whistle-blowing is a positive thing to do?
• Why would a social psychologist find it useful to survey people on their reactions to unethical behavior, and then study their responses?
• How might the values of fairness and loyalty come into conflict over a decision involving a workplace promotion, or a decision about whether to disclose sensitive documents to the public?
• Can people’s preference for fairness or loyalty, by themselves, predict whistle-blowing? Why or why not?
• How do the researchers suggest that people who value loyalty might be persuaded to support whistle-blowing activity?

Ethical Contexts | Ways to Use This Content

For the stories below, teachers may wish to assign students or groups to a particular issue and ask them to report back to the class on how the issues of whistle-blowing, speaking out or taking action play out in that particular place or situation. How do we evaluate someone who speaks out against a perceived injustice, or takes action while others stand by and watch? What factors determine whether we view the lone individual who takes action as a hero or a renegade?

Students may also choose their own issue, or search through a range of topics to find similarities and differences. What makes each situation different, and does the context influence our opinion of the person who takes a stand? For additional teaching ideas for how to use the resources included below, go to the bottom of this post.

1. In Your Neighborhood

Sometimes the toughest situations occur close to home. A man falls on the subway tracks . A woman is groped by a stranger on the way to work. Employees say they’re being mistreated in the local bakery . A man wonders whether he should help an overburdened fellow subway passenger (in a video from Facing History and Ourselves).

Consider this Room for Debate feature on bystanders . Then decide what makes each of the situations above unique; whether some individuals are more likely than others to receive help from a stranger; and what factors might make a person more likely to step forward and get involved.

2. At School

All students will encounter bullying or other forms of antisocial behavior at some point in their education. But what should be done about it? Peer pressure can be fierce, and research shows many people can be coerced into doing the wrong thing or keeping quiet. Researchers from Williams College say that schools must teach students to speak up . And sometimes, as in this article from the Guardian about a brave teacher from Iran, the adults can lead the way . What are the lessons for your school?

A Long Ride Toward a New China

Every summer, the blogger “Tiger Temple” bikes around China to report on rural news stories censored by state-run media.

3. In a Foreign Country

In China, the blogger “Tiger Temple” films and writes about government corruption and incompetence , even though he’s been arrested for doing so in the past. The police have harassed him and blocked many of his blogs, but he keeps going, and many of his sources risk arrest by speaking to him. In Myanmar, villagers have faced similar risks to protest government-backed construction or mining projects that endanger their farmland . In Moscow, a writer decides it’s too dangerous to join further antigovernment protests with her children.

Compare and contrast these examples of dissent. Would you describe these people as heroic, foolish, wise or traitorous for their activities?

4. In Your Own Country

Dissent happens in America, too. Do we view it as less heroic when it’s our own government being challenged?

Take Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency employee who leaked classified government documents. Some observers, like the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, say he doesn’t deserve the title of whistle-blower because his actions endangered reasonable government efforts to prevent terrorist attacks. Readers seem divided on the question, while some observers say it’s government lawbreaking that should be challenged.

Take notes on the arguments for and against Mr. Snowden’s actions, paying close attention to the language being used in each case. What are the values — like loyalty or fairness — that each side emphasizes?

5. On the Sports Field

In 1968, two members of the United States Olympic Team were suspended for raising their arms in a black-power salute in support of civil rights during their medal ceremony in Mexico. In 2014, the French soccer player Nicolas Anelka was barred from five matches after making a quenelle gesture, which many consider anti-Semitic and inspired by hate speech , prompting an uproar among French athletes in both Europe and America.

Analyze the two situations, both of which involve athletes making gestures with broader social meaning. What are the factors that have prompted many people to regard the 1968 athletes as heroes , while Anelka is widely condemned for his actions in 2014?

Pretend you work for a professional sports league, and the commissioner has just assigned you to develop guidelines for permissible gestures by the league’s athletes. How can you balance athletes’ freedom of speech — their right to speak out on issues they view as important — with the need to prevent actions that might be interpreted as derogatory or hateful? Should privately-owned sports teams or leagues get involved in such issues?

6. In the Workplace

What prompts some employees to speak out when they see wrongdoing at their company or workplace, while others remain silent? Read this story about corporate whistle-blowers , paying attention to the types of problems that get reported most frequently. Then read this commentary , which includes a discussion on the “fundamental rules of corporate life”:

• You never go around your boss.
• You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views.
• If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it.
• You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss.
• Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.

Ask your parents or other adults about the culture in their workplace. Is dissent or speaking out about problems encouraged or discouraged? And what can be done to encourage people to speak up for the right reasons, i.e., to help the organization to improve and better fulfill its mission?

7. In Politics

Ilya V. Ponomarev and Representative Dana Rohrabacher have something in common.

The two lawmakers — one from Russia’s lower house of Parliament, the other from the United States House of Representatives — both defend the unpopular view on Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Mr. Ponomarev is against it , while Mr. Rohrabacher is all for it , putting each one in opposition to the vast majority of his colleagues in each house. Neither one has been at all shy about speaking out, even though he is speaking in nearly complete isolation from fellow lawmakers.

Read their statements in the two articles. Then construct an imaginary dialogue between the two legislators, in which they discuss the invasion and other issues. Do you think they would find any common ground as fellow “lone wolves” — brave, independent voices of dissent — even though their positions on the invasion of Crimea are at odds?

8. On the College Campus

College administrators have gone to great lengths to find ways to decrease dangerous behavior on their campuses, like sexual assaults, that are often influenced by binge drinking. But sometimes, as in this Guardian article about Oxford University, students take the lead in combating problems like racial prejudice. What do you think? Are students part of the problem or part of the solution when it comes to fighting dangerous or undesirable activities on college campuses?

9. In the Laboratory

People don’t necessarily think of scientists as being particularly brave. But their work sometimes leads to tough dilemmas, and some do better than others at making the right calls. One climate researcher says scientists in his field can no longer remain on the sidelines as dispassionate bystanders . And you might be surprised how many other scientists have found it within themselves to speak out. Ask students to find a scientist or researcher who blew the whistle and make a short presentation to the class on the situation that prompted that person to act.

Going Further

Should whistle-blowers be supported? Research other whistle-blowing cases in The New York Times or the National Whistleblowers Center in which employees or government officials spoke out based upon their personal beliefs. Then decide: Should the government make it easier or harder for employees to speak up?

Does the system need fixing? Read this essay by Peter Ludlow, a philosopher at Northwestern University, that considers whether people must occasionally take action to address “systemic evil” in organizations or whole societies. Do you agree with his assertion that young people are particularly well attuned to such issues?

Can dissenters protest in constructive ways, without harming their societies? Read this Room for Debate feature in which experienced activists talk about what makes protest effective . Do their motives seem positive or threatening to the systems that they are challenging? Pick one or several activists whose messages seem particularly useful, and consider how their opponents might respond to their statements. Then use their ideas to design a strategy for confronting a completely different social problem.

This resource may be used to address the academic standards listed below.

Common Core E.L.A. Anchor Standards

1   Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

8   Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

Common Core Standards for Mathematical Practice

9   Understands the importance of Americans sharing and supporting certain values, beliefs, and principles of American constitutional democracy.

10   Understands the roles of voluntarism and organized groups in American social and political life.

11   Understands the role of diversity in American life and the importance of shared values, political beliefs, and civic beliefs in an increasingly diverse American society.

13   Understands the character of American political and social conflict and factors that tend to prevent or lower its intensity.

14   Understands issues concerning the disparities between ideals and reality in American political and social life.

27   Understands how certain character traits enhance citizens' ability to fulfill personal and civic responsibilities.

28   Understands how participation in civic and political life can help citizens attain individual and public goals.

29   Understands the importance of political leadership, public service, and a knowledgeable citizenry in American constitutional democracy.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

Interesting to cite Peter Ludlow. //www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/northwestern-investigation-corrective-actions-professor-peter-ludlow/Content?oid=12796485

Much appreciated. Looking forward to working with the material next week. Good mix of topics to work with.

The article should be updated to include references to all five of Jonathan Haidt’s categories of moral psychology.

I have a hard time understanding why someone would not intervene to help someone else in their time of need. I could never just stand around and watch another person be hurt and treated unfairly when I could stop it. If it were you that was being mistreated, you would hope someone else would step in for you. I expect more people to start standing up for others whether they know them or not.

There are people who are very brave to take action or speak out on a certain event they feel they need to speak out for. Then there are others that do remain silent for probably many reasons, or others can remain silent and speak their minds out at moments they may choose to. Everyone is different when it comes to speaking out on your decisions or others in life and it is a very risky thing to do. It is a very brave thing to do, to be able to do the right thing in life or decisions but at the same time it is a dangerous situation to do. When someone does try to make a difference in this world, there will always be someone who will not like the message you are trying to announce towards the event. It may be hate by the actions or just too simply disagree. There are problems when the issue will become violent and it does not need to be the easiest way is to make the choice the right way not the wrong way. For example, a student can do the right thing by speaking there mind out for bullying or a someone wanting to help those in need. Some people get punished for even doing the right thing but others who disagree with that certain person will think of it as a wrong thing and will want it stopped. The reason for them getting in trouble is because they will not want a scene of disapproval towards the event. People who do the right thing are not all bad people but want to speak their minds out of anything they may have a problem with and think it is wrong. The people who stay silent are also not bad people they just choose not to respond to it and it is there decision to not be involved. The main thing is doing the right thing is good and bad at the same time but it is also a very brave thing to do with or without the danger in it.

Corruption and injustice will always roam the world we live on today and forever on. The cause that started this plaque from the start of time was us humans. The reason injustice is committed because the person who performs it will be benefitting from others who are affected by the persons injustice. Corruption is the source that is seen or heard all over the world, people say a school is a safe place but there are times when a teacher takes advantage of his or her authority to punish or even abuse sexually a child at will and that injustice will not be reported. A hero is needed in much situations of injustice; and when the term hero is said most people think of super man or wonder woman, heroes are people who serve their community and protect it from corrupted people, a hero in our society would be a judge or police officer, even a priest. Besides the people of authority the brave heroes without a badge or gown can be any common citizen who speaks out of action to any injustice the person sees, that persons opinion might be the catalyst to a revolutionary change to eliminate all corrupted scum within our organizations, school systems, or even the church itself. That one person can prevent a raping to start or the theft of tax dollars going to politicians pockets and so on. I believe if we are all equal no corrupted acts will be made, if we receive the same health care and drive the same car, no one will find the need to steal or blackmail others. Every one will be working together creating a perfect environment.

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8 The Role of Moral Values in Everyday Life: Moral Development

The Role of Moral Values in Everyday Life: Moral Development

Educational Psychology. Authored by: Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton. Located at: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=153. License: CC BY: Attribution

Moral Development & Forming a sense of rights and responsibilities

Morality  is a system of beliefs about what is right and good compared to what is wrong or bad.  Moral development  refers to changes in moral beliefs as a person grows older and gains maturity. Moral beliefs are related to, but not identical with, moral  behavior : it is possible to know the right thing to do, but not actually do it. It is also not the same as knowledge of  social conventions , which are arbitrary customs needed for the smooth operation of society. Social conventions may have a moral element, but they have a primarily practical purpose. Conventionally, for example, motor vehicles all keep to the same side of the street (to the right in the United States, to the left in Great Britain). The convention allows for smooth, accident-free flow of traffic. But following the convention also has a moral element, because an individual who chooses to drive on the wrong side of the street can cause injuries or even death. In this sense, choosing the wrong side of the street is wrong morally, though the choice is also unconventional.

When it comes to schooling and teaching, moral choices are not restricted to occasional dramatic incidents, but are woven into almost every aspect of classroom life. Imagine this simple example. Suppose that you are teaching, reading to a small group of second-graders, and the students are taking turns reading a story out loud. Should you give every student the same amount of time to read, even though some might benefit from having additional time? Or should you give more time to the students who need extra help, even if doing so bores classmates and deprives others of equal shares of “floor time”? Which option is more fair, and which is more considerate? Simple dilemmas like this happen every day at all grade levels simply because students are diverse, and because class time and a teacher’s energy are finite.

Embedded in this rather ordinary example are moral themes about fairness or justice, on the one hand, and about consideration or care on the other. It is important to keep both themes in mind when thinking about how students develop beliefs about right or wrong. A  morality of justice  is about human rights—or more specifically, about respect for fairness, impartiality, equality, and individuals’ independence. A  morality of care , on the other hand, is about human responsibilities—more specifically, about caring for others, showing consideration for individuals’ needs, and interdependence among individuals.

Kohlberg’s morality of justice

One of the best-known explanations of how morality of justice develops was developed by Lawrence Kohlberg and his associates (Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983; Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1991). Using a stage model similar to Piaget’s, Kohlberg proposed six stages of moral development, grouped into three levels. Individuals experience the stages universally and in sequence as they form beliefs about justice. He named the levels simply preconventional, conventional, and (you guessed it) postconventional. The levels and stages are summarized in Table 1.

Preconventional justice: obedience and mutual advantage The preconventional  level of moral development coincides approximately with the preschool period of life and with Piaget’s preoperational period of thinking. At this age the child is still relatively self-centered and insensitive to the moral effects of actions on others. The result is a somewhat short-sighted orientation to morality. Initially (Kohlberg’s Stage 1), the child adopts an  ethics of obedience and punishment —a sort of “morality of keeping out of trouble.” The rightness and wrongness of actions is determined by whether actions are rewarded or punished by authorities such as parents or teachers. If helping yourself to a cookie brings affectionate smiles from adults, then taking the cookie is considered morally “good.” If it brings scolding instead, then it is morally “bad.” The child does not think about why an action might be praised or scolded; in fact, says Kohlberg, he would be incapable at Stage 1 of considering the reasons even if adults offered them.

Eventually the child learns not only to respond to positive consequences, but also learns how to  produce  them by exchanging favors with others. The new ability creates Stage 2, an  ethics of market exchange . At this stage the morally “good” action is one that favors not only the child, but another person directly involved. A “bad” action is one that lacks this reciprocity. If trading the sandwich from your lunch for the cookies in your friend’s lunch is mutually agreeable, then the trade is morally good; otherwise it is not. This perspective introduces a type of fairness into the child’s thinking for the first time. But it still ignores the larger context of actions—the effects on people not present or directly involved. In Stage 2, for example, it would also be considered morally “good” to pay a classmate to do another student’s homework, provided that both parties regard the arrangement as being fair.

Conventional justice: conformity to peers and society

As children move into the school years, their lives expand to include a larger number and range of peers and (eventually) of the community as a whole. The change leads to  conventional morality , which are beliefs based on what this larger array of people agree on—hence Kohlberg’s use of the term “conventional.” At first, in Stage 3, the child’s reference group are immediate peers, so Stage 3 is sometimes called the  ethics of peer opinion . If peers believe, for example, that it is morally good to behave politely with as many people as possible, then the child is likely to agree with the group and to regard politeness as not merely an arbitrary social convention, but a moral “good.” This approach to moral belief is a bit more stable than the approach in Stage 2, because the child is taking into account the reactions not just of one other person, but of many. But it can still lead astray if the group settles on beliefs that adults consider morally wrong, like “Shop lifting for candy bars is fun and desirable.”

Eventually, as the child becomes a youth and the social world expands even more, he or she acquires even larger numbers of peers and friends. He or she is therefore more likely to encounter disagreements about ethical issues and beliefs. Resolving the complexities lead to Stage 4, the  ethics of law and order , in which the young person increasingly frames moral beliefs in terms of what the majority of society believes. Now, an action is morally good if it is legal or at least customarily approved by most people, including people whom the youth does not know personally. This attitude leads to an even more stable set of principles than in the previous stage, though it is still not immune from ethical mistakes. A community or society may agree, for example, that people of a certain race should be treated with deliberate disrespect, or that a factory owner is entitled to dump waste water into a commonly shared lake or river. To develop ethical principles that reliably avoid mistakes like these require further stages of moral development.

Postconventional justice: social contract and universal principles

As a person becomes able to think abstractly (or “formally,” in Piaget’s sense), ethical beliefs shift from acceptance of what the community  does  believe to the  process  by which community beliefs are formed. The new focus constitutes Stage 5, the  ethics of social contract . Now an action, belief, or practice is morally good if it has been created through fair, democratic processes that respect the rights of the people affected. Consider, for example, the laws in some areas that require motorcyclists to wear helmets. In what sense are the laws about this behavior ethical? Was it created by consulting with and gaining the consent of the relevant people? Were cyclists consulted and did they give consent? Or how about doctors or the cyclists’ families? Reasonable, thoughtful individuals disagree about how thoroughly and fairly these  consultation  processes should be. In focusing on the processes by which the law was created, however, individuals are thinking according to Stage 5, the ethics of social contract, regardless of the position they take about wearing helmets. In this sense, beliefs on both sides of a debate about an issue can sometimes be morally sound even if they contradict each other.

Paying attention to due process certainly seems like it should help to avoid mindless conformity to conventional moral beliefs. As an ethical strategy, though, it too can sometimes fail. The problem is that an ethics of social contract places more faith in democratic process than the process sometimes deserves, and does not pay enough attention to the content of what gets decided. In principle (and occasionally in practice), a society could decide democratically to kill off every member of a racial minority, for example, but would deciding this by due process make it ethical? The realization that ethical means can sometimes serve unethical ends leads some individuals toward Stage 6, the  ethics of self-chosen, universal principles . At this final stage, the morally good action is based on personally held principles that apply both to the person’s immediate life as well as to the larger community and society. The universal principles may include a belief in democratic due process (Stage 5 ethics), but also other principles, such as a belief in the dignity of all human life or the sacredness of the natural environment. At Stage 6, the universal principles will guide a person’s beliefs even if the principles mean disagreeing occasionally with what is customary (Stage 4) or even with what is legal (Stage 5).

Gilligan’s morality of care

As logical as they sound, Kohlberg’s stages of moral justice are not sufficient for understanding the development of moral beliefs. To see why, suppose that you have a student who asks for an extension of the deadline for an assignment. The justice orientation of Kohlberg’s theory would prompt you to consider issues of whether granting the request is fair. Would the late student be able to put more effort into the assignment than other students? Would the extension place a difficult demand on you, since you would have less time to mark the assignments? These are important considerations related to the rights of students and the teacher. In addition to these, however, are considerations having to do with the responsibilities that you and the requesting student have for each other and for others. Does the student have a valid personal reason (illness, death in the family, etc.) for the assignment being late? Will the assignment lose its educational value if the student has to turn it in prematurely? These latter questions have less to do with fairness and rights, and more to do with taking care of and responsibility for students. They require a framework different from Kohlberg’s to be understood fully.

One such framework has been developed by Carol Gilligan, whose ideas center on a  morality of care , or system of beliefs about human responsibilities, care, and consideration for others. Gilligan proposed three moral positions that represent different extents or breadth of ethical care. Unlike Kohlberg, Piaget, or Erikson, she does not claim that the positions form a strictly developmental sequence, but only that they can be ranked hierarchically according to their depth or subtlety. In this respect her theory is “semi-developmental” in a way similar to Maslow’s theory of motivation (Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Taylor, Gilligan, & Sullivan, 1995). Table 2 summarizes the three moral positions from Gilligan’s theory

Position 1: caring as survival

The most basic kind of caring is a survival orientation , in which a person is concerned primarily with his or her own welfare. If a teenage girl with this ethical position is wondering whether to get an abortion, for example, she will be concerned entirely with the effects of the abortion on herself. The morally good choice will be whatever creates the least stress for herself and that disrupts her own life the least. Responsibilities to others (the baby, the father, or her family) play little or no part in her thinking.

As a moral position, a survival orientation is obviously not satisfactory for classrooms on a widespread scale. If every student only looked out for himself or herself, classroom life might become rather unpleasant! Nonetheless, there are situations in which focusing primarily on yourself is both a sign of good mental health and relevant to teachers. For a child who has been bullied at school or sexually abused at home, for example, it is both healthy and morally desirable to speak out about how bullying or abuse has affected the victim. Doing so means essentially looking out for the victim’s own needs at the expense of others’ needs, including the bully’s or abuser’s. Speaking out, in this case, requires a survival orientation and is healthy because the child is taking caring of herself.

Position 2: conventional caring

A more subtle moral position is  caring for others , in which a person is concerned about others’ happiness and welfare, and about reconciling or integrating others’ needs where they conflict with each other. In considering an abortion, for example, the teenager at this position would think primarily about what other people prefer. Do the father, her parents, and/or her doctor want her to keep the child? The morally good choice becomes whatever will please others the best. This position is more demanding than Position 1, ethically and intellectually, because it requires coordinating several persons’ needs and values. But it is often morally insufficient because it ignores one crucial person: the self.

Position 3: integrated caring

The most developed form of moral caring in Gilligan’s model is  integrated caring , the coordination of personal needs and values with those of others. Now the morally good choice takes account of everyone  including  yourself, not everyone  except  yourself. In considering an abortion, a woman at Position 3 would think not only about the consequences for the father, the unborn child, and her family, but also about the consequences for herself. How would bearing a child affect her own needs, values, and plans? This perspective leads to moral beliefs that are more comprehensive, but ironically are also more prone to dilemmas because the widest possible range of individuals are being considered.

Character development: Integrating ethical understanding, care, and action

The theories described so far all offer frameworks for understanding how children grow into youth and adults. Those by Maslow, Kohlberg, and Gilligan are more specific than the one by Erikson in that they focus on the development of understanding about ethics. From a teacher’s point of view, though, the theories are all limited in two ways. One problem is that they focus primarily on cognition—on what children  think  about ethical issues—more than on emotions and actions. The other is that they say little about how to encourage ethical development.

Looking at how to encourage ethical development from an educator’s perspective

Encouragement is part of teachers’ jobs, and doing it well requires understanding not only what students know about ethics, but also how they feel about it and what ethical actions they are actually prepared to take.

Many educators have recognized these educational needs, and a number of them have therefore developed practical programs that integrate ethical understanding, care, and action. As a group the programs are often called  character education , though individual programs have a variety of specific names (for example,  moral dilemma education ,  integrative ethical education ,  social competence education , and many more). Details of the programs vary, but they all combine a focus on ethical knowledge with attention to ethical feelings and actions (Elkind & Sweet, 2004; Berkowitz & Bier, 2006; Narvaez, 2010). Character education programs goes well beyond just teaching students to obey ethical rules, such as “Always tell the whole truth” or “Always do what the teacher tells you to do.” Such rules require very little thinking on the part of the student, and there are usually occasions in which a rule that is supposedly universal needs to be modified, “bent,” or even disobeyed. (For example, if telling the whole truth might hurt someone’s feelings, it might sometimes be more considerate—and thus more ethical—to soften the truth a bit, or even to say nothing at all.)

Instead, character education is about inviting students to think about the broad questions of his or her life, such as “What kind of person should I be?” or “How should I live my life?” Thoughtful answers to such broad questions help to answer a host of more specific questions that have ethical implications, such as “Should I listen to the teacher right now, even if she is a bit boring, or just tune out?” or “Should I offer to help my friend with the homework she is struggling with, or hold back so that learns to do it herself?” Most of the time, there is not enough time to reason about questions like these deliberately or consciously. Responses have to become intuitive, automatic, and  embodied —meaning that they have to be based in fairly immediate emotional responses (Narvaez, 2009). The goal of character education is to develop students’ capacities to respond to daily ethical choices not only consciously and cognitively, but also intuitively and emotionally. To the extent that this goal is met, students can indeed live a good, ethically responsible life.

Schoolwide programs of character education

In the most comprehensive approaches to character education, an entire school commits itself to developing students’ ethical character, despite the immense diversity among students (Minow, Schweder, & Markus, 2008). All members of the staff—not just teachers and administrators, but also custodians, and educational assistants—focus on developing positive relationships with students. The underlying theme that develops is one of cooperation and mutual care, not competition. Fairness, respect and honesty pervade class and school activities; discipline, for example, focuses on solving conflicts between students and between students and teachers, rather than on rewarding obedience or punishing wrong-doers. The approach requires significant reliance on democratic meetings and discussions, both in classrooms and wherever else groups work together in school.

Classroom programs of character education

Even if a teacher is teaching character education simply within her own classroom, there are many strategies available. The goal in this case is to establish the classroom as a place where everyone feels included, and where everyone treats everyone else with civility and respect. Conflicts and disagreements may still occur, but in a caring community they can be resolved without undue anger or hostility.

Berkowitz, M. & Bier, M. (2006).  What works in character education: A research-driven guide for educators . St. Louis, MO: Center for Character and Citizenship.

Brown, L. & Gilligan, C. (1992).  Meeting at the crossroads: Women’s psychology and girls’ development . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Elkind, D. & Sweet, F. (2006).  How to do character education . Accessed February 1, 2011

at http://www.goodcharacter.com/Article_4.html .

Kohlberg, L., Levine, C., & Hewer, A. (1983).  Moral stages: A current formulation and a response to critics . Basel: S. Karger.

Minow, M., Shweder, R., & Markus, H. (Eds.). (2008).  Just schools: Pursuing equality in societies of difference . New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Narvaez, D. (2010). Moral complexity: The fatal attraction of truthiness and the importance of mature moral functioning.  Perspectives on psychological science , 5(2), 162–181.

Taylor, J. & Gilligan, C., & Sullivan, A. (1995).  Between voice and silence: Women and girls, race and relationship . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The Role of Moral Values in Everyday Life: Moral Development Copyright © 2020 by Educational Psychology. Authored by: Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton. Located at: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=153. License: CC BY: Attribution is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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3 How Can I Be a Better Person? On Virtue Ethics

Douglas Giles

This chapter explores a variety of approaches to the question of moral virtue and what it means to be a good person. It examines four ethical systems that revolve around the concept of virtue: Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Aquinas’s Christian version of Aristotelian virtue ethics, Buddhist virtue ethics, and Daoist and Confucian virtue ethics. Each will be presented as a different way of understanding what it might mean to live as a good person. For Aristotle, this is to be understood in terms of striving for the mean between extremes in the context of a well-ordered political community. For Aquinas, it is to be understood within the context of Christianity and natural law. For Buddhism, virtue is understood in terms of a life oriented toward the eightfold path that leads to the end of suffering. For Chinese philosophy, both Daoist and Confucian, virtue means being in harmony with the Cosmic Dao.

What is Virtue Ethics?

In philosophies of virtue ethics, rather than an emphasis on following rules, the emphasis is on developing oneself as a good person. It is not that following rules is not important; it is more the sense that being ethical means more than simply following the rules. For example, given an opportunity to donate to a charity, deontologists (see Chapter 6 ) would consider whether there is an ethical rule that required them to donate. Utilitarians (see Chapter 5 ) would consider whether a donation would produce better consequences if they donated than if they did not. Virtue ethicists would consider whether donating is the kind of action that a virtuous person would do. Another example would be deciding whether to lie or tell the truth. Rather than focus on rules or consequences, virtue ethicists ask what kind of person do they want to be: honest or dishonest? Virtue ethicists place more importance on being a person who is honest, trustworthy, generous and other virtues that lead to a good life, and place less importance on one’s ethical duty or obligations. A common theme among virtue ethicists is stressing the importance of cultivating ethical values in order to increase human happiness. Businesses today increasingly incorporate virtue ethics in their work culture, often having a “statement of values” guiding their operations.

Because the right ethical action depends on the particularities of individual people and their particular situations, virtue ethics links goodness with wisdom because virtue is knowing how to make ethical decisions rather than knowing a list of general ethical rules that will not apply to every circumstance. Virtue ethicists tend to reject the view that ethical theory should provide a set of commands that dictate what we should do on all occasions. Instead, virtue ethicists advocate the cultivation of wisdom and character that people can use to internalize basic ethical principles from which they can determine the ethical course of action in particular situations. Virtue ethicists tend to see ethical principles as being inherent in the world and as being discoverable by means of rational reflection and disciplined living. The different forms of virtue ethics may or may not focus on God as the ultimate source of ethical principles. What unites the various forms of virtue ethics is the focus on moral education to cultivate moral wisdom, discernment, and character in the belief that ethical virtue will manifest in ethical actions.

Aristotle on Excellence and Flourishing

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) believed that to understand something we need to understand its nature and proper function (see Chapter 2 ). He also believed that everything has an end, or goal, toward which it naturally moves. For example, a seed grows into a tree because the purpose and function of the seed is to grow into a tree. Objects fulfill their purpose, not out of conscious desire, but because it is in their nature to fulfill their functions. Aristotle believed that our purpose is to pursue our proper human end, eud ai monia , which is best understood as human flourishing or living well. Eud ai monia is not momentary pleasure but enduring contentment—not just a good day but a good life. Aristotle said that one swallow does not make a summer, and so, too, one day does not make one blessed and happy. It is human nature to move toward eudaimonia and this is the purpose, function, or final goal ( telos ) of all human activity. We work to make money, to make a home, and we sacrifice to improve our future, all with the ultimate aim of living well.

Human flourishing means acting in ways that cause your essential human nature to achieve its most excellent form of expression. Aristotle held that a good life of lasting contentment can be gained only by a life of virtue—a life lived with both phrónesis , or “practical wisdom,” and aretē , or “excellence.” Aristotle defines human good as the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics that

we take the characteristic activity of a human being to be a certain kind of life; and if we take this kind of life to be activity of the soul and actions in accordance with reason, and the characteristic activity of the good person to be to carry this out well and nobly, and a characteristic activity to be accomplished well when it is accomplished in accordance with the appropriate virtue; then if this is so, the human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. (1.7) [1]

The ethical demand on us is to develop our character to become a person of excellent ethical wisdom because, from that excellence, good actions will flow, leading to a good life. Virtuous actions come from a virtuous person; therefore, it is wise to focus on being a virtuous person.

For Aristotle, ethics is a science with objective rational principles that can be discovered and understood through reason. Whether a particular course of action is good or not, and whether a person is good or not, are ideas that can be understood objectively. The cultivation of virtue must be accompanied by a cultivation of rationality. Aristotle saw the human soul as having three components: the nutritive part, responsible for taking in nutrition; the sensitive and appetitive part, responsible for sensing and responding to the environment, including the desires and appetites that motivate actions; and the rational part, responsible for practical and productive intellect. All three components are essential to being a human, but they exist in a clear hierarchy, with the faculties of reason at the top; these can and should control and guide the appetites into productive and ethical actions. Aristotle characterizes the desiring and emotional part of the soul as partaking of reason insofar as it complies with reason and accepts its leadership. The person of good virtue has cultivated a stable soul that is not swayed by appetites or desires but is governed by reason. Being ethical, then, is a skill that one develops. Just as you can through practice become good at math or playing a musical instrument, you can through practice become a virtuous person. When you have reached a certain level of skill in math or playing music, you no longer need a teacher to guide you, and you quickly can understand what to do. The same is true in Aristotle’s conception of ethical decision making—it becomes an ingrained habit.

How can the rational human come to understand what proper ethical actions are? Aristotle’s answer is his doctrine of the mean, or the balanced course of action:

Virtue is a state of character concerned with a choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the person of practical wisdom would determine it. ( Nicomachean Ethics 2.6)

We see here Aristotle’s emphasis on a virtuous character that enables us to make a rational ethical choice. There are two important aspects of this. The first is the concept of the choice lying in a mean relative to our circumstances, and the second is that what the mean is in any particular situation can be determined by the person of practical reason. The ethical course of action is relative to our particular circumstances, meaning that there is not one rule that fits all situations, but the ethical course of action is objectively true in that any rational person looking at the situation will be able to understand the correct ethical course of action.

By the mean, Aristotle refers to something midway between two extremes. The virtuous act is the one that falls between the extremes of what is deficient and what is excessive relative to the situation.

All of the moral virtues are a mean between harmful extremes (too little, too much) in our actions and emotions:

Sometimes the mean lies closer to one extreme than the other because of the particular circumstances involved. Because situations are different, it is not sufficient to say, “Be brave” because the mean of bravery differs from situation to situation. There are still ethical standards, but they are relative to the situation. It is always wrong to eat too much, but “too much” will be different for each individual. That is why an emphasis on virtue—the ability to discern how to make ethical decisions—is the key to an ethical, good, and balanced life that is worth living.

The better you are at finding and acting on the mean, the more you have phrónesis (“practical wisdom”). This form of practical reason helps one recognize which features of a situation are morally relevant and how one can do the right thing in practice. Practical reason is rational because it is open to rational influence. Again, virtue is a learned skill. A person who listens to and learns from the reason of others is a rational person, and the same holds for ethics. As Aristotle sees it, every thought that one has, and action that one takes, contributes to the development of either a virtue or a vice. Virtues such as temperance, courage, and truthfulness become increasingly a part of our actions the more we intend to do them and the more we practice doing them. The truly virtuous person:

• Knows what she or he is doing.
• Chooses a virtuous act for its own sake.
• Chooses as a result of a settled moral state.
• Chooses gladly and easily.

These are possible only through developing a virtuous disposition in which the soul is settled by reason. The more you practice virtue, the more you are capable of virtue because virtue becomes a way of life. Leading an objectively rational good life will produce a subjectively happy life of the kind appropriate to being human.

Thomas Aquinas on Virtue

Most of Aristotle’s writings were lost to Western Europe up until the twelfth century. When Islam spread across Egypt, the Levant, and Persia in the seventh century, libraries of old Greek writings were found, including works of Aristotle lost to the Latin-speaking world. Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rush (Averroës), and other Islamic thinkers recognized the value of Aristotle and wrote commentaries on his works and other works extending his philosophy. Those Islamic works were discovered by Christians when they conquered central Islamic Spain in the mid-twelfth century. Like their Islamic counterparts a few centuries earlier, Christian scholars knew what they had in the Islamic libraries. Works by Aristotle (who the Christian scholars knew from his logic books) were eagerly translated into Latin and distributed widely.

Aristotle’s texts posed problems for Christian philosophers in reconciling them with Christian theology, which led to many arguments within the thirteenth-century Catholic Church. Enter Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who wrote the Summa Theologia (The Sum of Theological Knowledge), creating a system that could, as advertised, provide answers to all questions. Aquinas’s philosophy was based on the writings of Aristotle, who he reverently called “The Philosopher” and placed as a source of truth almost on the same level as the Bible. You will see similarities between Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s ethical systems.

Like Aristotle, Aquinas based ethics on the pursuit of our proper human end. Unlike Aristotle, Aquinas believed that our proper human end of eud ai monia is not found in this world. Aristotle’s system, Aquinas believed, was as good as humans could achieve on the basis of the natural realm, but our end as humans is to be perfected through union with God. For Aquinas, every event occurs because there is some end toward which things are directed, and we humans, like everything else in the universe, have our own ends. Unlike everything else, we as humans can consciously choose which ends we pursue, and ethics concerns which ends are worth our efforts to pursue. Like Aristotle, Aquinas believed that ethical understanding comes through virtue and that virtue is a skill that must be developed. Also like Aristotle, Aquinas believed that we learn what is ethical through our reason, which we can use to uncover God’s natural law that is imbued in creation. By rationally reflecting on what is in accord with nature and our own natural inclinations, we can understand the ethical virtues.

Aquinas’s Aristotelian idea that humans can rationally understand ethical principles had to deal with the Christian concept that humanity’s sinful nature prevented such understanding. He held that sin affects our moral life but not our rational life, clearing the way for the use of our human intellect to learn ethical truths. He borrowed from Islamic philosophers the conception that intellect is both passive and active. Intellect passively takes in sense experience and ideas but actively processes them to abstract universal truths. This is a natural process that is inherent in the human mind without requiring illumination from God and that is unaffected by sin (as was commonly taught in Aquinas’s time). The universals abstracted by the mind from multiple individuals (e.g., “triangle” can be abstracted from individual triangles) are tied to real features in the world, the universals created by God and first existing in the mind of God, who used them to create the objects in the world. Put simply, we use our intellect to understand the world God has created. It is an orderly and purposeful world, with all of the objects in it receiving their purpose from God. By observing the world and reflecting on our observations, we can learn about the natural world, including God’s ethical laws, which permeate the natural world. Aquinas used this conception to develop what we now know as “natural law”—the idea that ethical truths are ingrained in nature (see Chapter 2 for more on Aquinas’s view of natural law).

To be virtuous, we need to learn God’s natural law that governs the motion of objects in nature and instructs us in ethical behavior. To be rational, which is central to our human ends, requires intellectual discipline, but it is the way to virtue. Through self-discipline and reflecting on the natural law, we learn and develop as ingrained habits the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice. Virtuous persons practice the four cardinal virtues in their daily lives, and from those virtues flow ethical behaviors in all situations.

Buddhist Virtue Ethics

Buddhism is a spiritual and philosophical tradition founded by Siddhārtha Gautama in India in the fifth century BCE. There are many schools of Buddhist thought in many countries, from monasteries devoted to religious ritual devotion to solitary practitioners of meditative practices. A common thread among most Buddhist schools of thought is an emphasis on a virtue ethical system that teaches the art of becoming balanced and harmonious through humility, with the goal of being free from dukkha , or suffering or anguish. We can free ourselves from suffering by extinguishing hatred and ignorance, following the teaching of the founder of Buddhism, Siddhārtha Gautama, who became “Buddha,” which means “the Awakened One.” Siddhartha Gautama taught that what could be called evil acts are performed out of ignorance and fear; therefore, rules and threats of punishment do not curtail these acts. We learn how to act in a suitable way ( sammā , meaning best or most effective in the circumstances) by focusing on thinking suitably because our thoughts lead to our actions. The emphasis in Buddhism is on what is suitable and unsuitable rather than on the Western sense of right and wrong or good and evil. A life of virtue is outlined by the eightfold path: suitable view, intention, mindfulness, concentration, effort, speech, bodily conduct, and livelihood. By making one’s thoughts and actions suitable, one promotes positive outcomes and lessens harmful outcomes. This is especially important to Buddhists because of the Gautama’s teaching about karma, a concept that underlies Buddhist ethics and differs significantly from the divine command ethics found in many religions.

The idea of karma is that it is a natural phenomenon that we can think of similarly to how we think of the laws of physics. The law of karma says that thoughts and actions that intend to harm others will eventually cause harm to ourselves and that thoughts and actions that intend to benefit others will eventually benefit us. In the Buddhist conception of time, “eventually” could mean in a future life that is multiple reincarnations away, so Buddhists think less in terms of immediate consequences of thoughts and actions and more in terms of the intrinsic value of them. Karma is not a strict determinism in that we still have free will and can mitigate the consequences of karma through our virtuous thoughts and actions. To avoid future suffering in this life or future lives, a Buddhist focuses on developing inner virtue to be able to think and act suitably in order to avoid negative karma, and to generate positive karma. As with Aristotle’s virtue ethics, the more you practice virtue, the more you are capable of virtue. Having made a commitment to follow the eightfold path as a way of life, you are disposed to follow those rules.

Chinese Virtue Ethics

For more than two millennia, Chinese philosophy has been dominated by two great traditions, Confucianism and Daoism (Taoism), that have influenced China throughout its history and are important to Chinese culture still to this day. Both traditions are founded on their teaching of the Dao , which is best translated as “the way.” Dao is both noun and verb, both how the universe is and how things behave properly. The Dao cannot be described completely in words but can be sensed as the source of all things and the rhythm of Being. All things come from Dao, and all things have their own Dao, or essence, which comes from the Cosmic Dao. Adepts of both Confucianism and Daoism believe that to be in the Dao and in harmony with it is to be virtuous and at peace, and that this state of enduring harmony with the Dao, similar to Aristotle’s eu dai monia , is the proper human goal. Both Confucianist and Daoist ethical systems teach that a community flourishes when its members are in harmony with the Dao, and that the state flourishes when its leaders are in harmony with the Dao. However, Confucianism and Daoism are in disagreement about how communities and governments can keep in harmony with the Dao and, thus, promulgate different ideas about how to attain virtue.

Confucianism is the social and ethical system set down by Kongzi (Master Kong) (c. 551-479 BCE), known in the West as Confucius. Kongzi saw the virtuous person as an artistic creation achieved through the diligent practice of ethical excellence by way of strict ritual practice. Ritual, or Li , is the art and practice of crafting one’s character from the raw material of human nature. Just as a craftsperson uses tools to fashion wood or stone, a person uses ritual behaviors to carve and polish his or her character. Li extends to all aspects of life; Kongzi taught that our every action affects our character and our environment, so every activity needs to be performed with the proper respect and procedures. Kongzi issued hundreds of rites in sayings covering many aspects of human life, how youth should behave toward their parents, what colors of clothing one should wear and when, how one should greet another person, protocols that should be observed at the court of the ruler, and so on—all to be strictly observed in order to cultivate the comprehensive ethical virtue known as Ren .

Most of the rites specified by Kongzi concern human interactions, reflecting the great importance he placed on suitably respecting one’s superiors. Ancient Chinese society was highly stratified, and Kongzi thought that maintaining the social hierarchy was essential to social order. Showing respect for one’s superiors, such as government officials, elders, and ancestors, was more than polite; it was essential for society to function properly. Filial piety was more than respecting your family elders dead or alive; it was the fundamental building block of social harmony and justice. The more one practiced the rites, the more one developed virtue, most importantly the virtue of Ren or benevolence. Ren should be understood not as acts of kindness but as acts of propriety that create virtue in oneself and society. Practicing the rites virtuously brings each person and society in harmony with the Dao and leads to a good life for all.

The philosophy of Daoism has long provided a strong counterpoint to Confucianism. As the name implies, Daoism focuses on harmony with the Dao rather than on human teachings, the opposite of the Confucian emphasis on a system of ritual behavior. Daoist ethics centers on the fundamental virtue of wu wei , meaning “effortless action.” Daoism rejects formal ritual and deliberately striving for virtue, emphasizing instead that virtue comes from naturalness, simplicity, and spontaneity. Daoism at times seems to be anti-civilization with its calls for us to detach from the artificiality of social traditions and rituals and to adopt instead a quiet life communing with nature. At other times, though, Daoism attempts to reform society, especially its leaders:

If you want to be a great leader, you must learn to follow the Dao. Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts and the world will govern itself. The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. (Laozi [ca. 400-250 BCE] 1991, Chapter 57)

The Daoist idea is that separating ourselves from nature is separating ourselves from the Dao and that what most contributes to this separation from the Dao are the social institutions of government, military, and other social hierarchies and power structures. The Daoist virtue of wu wei involves a life of walking away from the artificial trappings of human pretension and arrogance and shaping your actions according to what others think of you. Instead, a Daoist seeks a oneness with the rhythms of nature, which probably requires walking away from society itself. Deliberately, Daoism does not provide a set of rules and rituals because central to Daoist philosophy is the idea that ritual does not cultivate virtue. Instead, Daoism provides guidelines on cultivating the virtues of selflessness, moderation, detachment, and humility. Accordingly, Daoist philosophers did not publish books detailing ritual practices like Confucians did. Instead, Daoists created poetry and stories that show Daoist sages teaching about and exemplifying these virtues.

Objections to Virtue Ethics

There are two main objections to virtue ethics as an ethical system: its vagueness and its relativism.

First, virtue ethics is too vague and subjective, and does not produce explicit rules for moral conduct that can tell us how to act in specific circumstances. When facing ethical dilemmas, we feel better if we have a clear answer about what to do. Virtue ethics offers general ideals rather than definitive commands. We can create laws based on a definitive ethic against stealing, but we cannot make laws saying “be wise” or “be patient.” Also problematic is that virtue ethics tends to hold that its virtues apply variably according to the situation. It is far easier to practice the principles of never lying or always being generous. Virtue ethics says there are times when lying is a better course of action and being generous is a worse course of action, and this variability creates uncertainty. What is more, how can I decide when the virtue applies and when it should not? Telling me to be wise and reflect on the ethical virtues and the situation is offering more vagueness. Finally, we want to be able to rely on other people’s behavior, and those who practice virtue ethics may vary in their behavior, so we may not know exactly where we stand with them.

To consider this objection, we need to think about the nature of ethics itself. Yes, we could say definitively, “You should not lie” and “you should not steal.” But what are those prohibitions based on? A virtue ethicist could respond by arguing that both are based on the ethical principle of honesty and that if that is so, then cultivating the virtue of honesty will lead one not to lie or steal from others. A virtue ethicist would also say that virtue ethics focuses on the foundation of ethical life encapsulated in objective reason (Aristotle), God’s natural law (Thomas), the law of karma (Buddhism), or the Dao (Confucianism or Daoism), and therefore virtue is not entirely variable. Virtue ethics provides us with the tools to make ethical decisions in the varying circumstances of our daily lives. The variability in the behavior of those who practice virtue ethics reflects the variability of everyday life.

Second, there are different cultural definitions of human flourishing and virtue. All human cultures have ethical values, but values vary across cultures. So how can we decide which set of virtues is right? Even within a culture, two people will have different views about what the virtues are, and when and how they apply. Because virtue ethics gives us no specific commands for how to act, each person is left to himself or herself to decide how to act. Virtue ethics is too relative to be a helpful ethical theory.

Ethical relativism is a concern. If ethics means anything, it has to have some objective basis and cannot be left entirely up to arbitrary whim. Virtue ethicists are aware of this danger and would respond to it that virtue ethics is based on objective realities of the world and human nature. The virtues are manifestations of how things are, or should be, outside of cultural or individual subjectivity. Different cultures differ on how ethical virtues should be applied, but every culture values fundamental virtues such as honesty, benevolence, courage, and justice. Differences in how cultures apply virtues may reflect objective differences in their circumstances. When we interact with another culture, those differences do need to be dealt with, but saying our culture is completely right and the other culture wrong is not a helpful approach. Individuals similarly face the burden of needing to determine how best to apply the virtues, and needing to deal with conflicts with others over how they think is best to apply the virtues. But is this not similar to the decisions we have to make in all aspects of our lives?

Aristotle. (ca. 350 BCE) 2000. Nicomachean Ethics , trans. Roger Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Laozi. (ca. 400-250 BCE) 1991. Dao de Jing , trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Harper Perennial.

Further Reading

Athanassoulis, Nafsika. 2002. Virtue Ethics. London: Bloomsbury.

Crisp, Roger and Michael Slote, eds. 1997. Virtue Ethics . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Darwall, Stephen, ed. 2002. Virtue Ethics . Oxford/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Foot, Philippa. 2003. Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy . New York: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, Peter. 2000. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Liu, JeeLoo. 2008. An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism . Oxford/Malden, MA: Wiley.

Russell, Daniel C., ed. 2013. The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• References to Aristotle are formatted using the book and chapter of the text. This citation, for example, corresponds to Book 1, Chapter 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics. ↵

How Can I Be a Better Person? On Virtue Ethics Copyright © 2019 by Douglas Giles is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Essay Samples on Ethics in Everyday Life

A life of integrity: how to live an ethical life.

Living an ethical life is a conscious and deliberate choice to uphold values that promote goodness, respect, and fairness in our interactions with others and the world around us. Ethical living transcends personal gain and societal norms, focusing on principles that contribute to the well-being...

• Ethics in Everyday Life

Why is Responsibility Important in Everyday Life

What is social responsibility, why is responsibility important? Social responsibility is a duty every individual has to perform to the community. A better future is what we seek for the upcoming generation and youth and the best to bring about the expected changes is when...

• Responsibility
• Socialization

The Ethical Issues Of Good And Evil In Everyday Life

This world, though it may seem very black and white, actually has a lot of gray area that people have a hard time seeing and feeling. People generally see the world or the people in this world as either good or evil, but I believe...

• Good and Evil

The Moral Concepts Of Good And Evil In Life

Life is a unique blend of good and bad things and it is very easy to get diverted by the bad things in life. Nobody’s life is perfect in this world, despite the imperfection one must find a way to lead a good life. But...

Ethics Of Mobile Phone Overuse And Its Impact On Interpersonal Relationships

Introduction Phones have made a huge impact in society in the last 10 years. To be able to enter the internet from your pocket, to talking with someone that lives halfway across the world. Having lunch with your friends you see people all around on...

• Interpersonal Communication
• Negative Impact of Technology

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Ethics: A Guiding Light in Human Life

Ethics must be the primary source of reference when it comes to evaluate a situation through acting upon it by making a decision. What’s right and what’s wrong depends on the perception of the person that is derived from the certain values that humans hold....

• Decision Making

Exploring the Importance of Ethics in Our Lives

 Ethics is the discipline of moral and principle involvement to gain knowledge and experience. This specific code of conduct administers our thoughts so as to walk away from certain situations, almost like fleet or flight. “Rome was not built in a day”, it relates to...

How Spirituality and Ethics Connect to Our Life

Spirituality is based on humanistic values while Ethics is based on moral principal. It has been know that spirituality can come from religious beliefs. The belief that everything you do is judged not by man but God himself, spiritually uses understanding to connect with the...

• Spirituality

How To Go Through Life Without Fighting

With all the joyful information there is always a lot of compassion. The festive moments have their share of instant despair. That's life. The encouraging exchange of a pregnancy and the hope of a new life that must be born have an effect that causes...

• Personal Philosophy

Best topics on Ethics in Everyday Life

1. A Life of Integrity: How to Live an Ethical Life

2. Why is Responsibility Important in Everyday Life

3. The Ethical Issues Of Good And Evil In Everyday Life

4. The Moral Concepts Of Good And Evil In Life

5. Ethics Of Mobile Phone Overuse And Its Impact On Interpersonal Relationships

6. Ethics: A Guiding Light in Human Life

7. Exploring the Importance of Ethics in Our Lives

8. How Spirituality and Ethics Connect to Our Life

9. How To Go Through Life Without Fighting

• Personal Identity
• Human Nature
• Self Reflection
• Euthyphro Dilemma
• Michel Foucault
• John Stuart Mill
• Personal Ethics
• Tabula Rasa

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Religion and Its Publics

Everyday ethics: a review by eric hilker, august 31, 2020.

Lamb, Michael, and Brian A. Williams, eds. Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and The Practices of Ordinary Life . Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2019.

Banner, Michael. The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Everyday Ethics is a collection of essays that responds to Michael Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life , yet folks should be interested in what Everyday Ethics represents, whether or not they are familiar with Banner’s work. Everyday Ethics goes beyond its immediate responsive purpose by taking part in, and providing methodological reflections upon, a movement by Christian moral theologians who engage more deeply with the work and tools of anthropology. There has been something of a convergence of interests between these fields of late. In anthropology, some scholars have turned toward moral philosophy or theology in an attempt to better understand the agonistic pressures within moral lives and/or to identify more clearly with suffering subjects—a point made by Patrick McKearney in his very helpful bibliographic essay. For moral theology, in contrast, the movement represents an important shift away from an overemphasis on the abstract, theoretical, and textual, and towards the concrete, experienced, and embodied.

Conversation between fields that take themselves to be descriptive and those which take themselves to be normative has not always been very common, and when there has been cross pollination between them, it has often been at the level of abstract theory: if virtue ethicists have been willing to adopt Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical construct of the habitus to describe how persons exist in social contexts, they have not run to anthropologists’ descriptions of everyday life to help them think more concretely about something like the concept of courage. Yet this is just what Banner and his respondents do. In a chapter of The Ethics of Everyday Life , Banner places Augustine’s reflections on the virgin birth in conversation with an anthropological description of the kinship relations that result from assisted reproductive technologies. Everyday Ethics extends this sort of work suggested by Banner. For example, Eric Gregory’s essay looks at ethnographic work on humanitarianism, where efficiency has become the top priority, and considers how Christians should regard such a priority given theological commitments to relationality—i.e. to loving the neighbor.

A strength of Everyday Ethics is related to a weakness of Banner’s book, one that he admits to in his own response to the essays. Banner positions his use of the thick description of social anthropology as an intervention in the field of moral theology without recognizing other work that is very closely aligned with his commitments. While he regards Banner’s work as exemplary, Charles Mathewes begins his essay by noting that The Ethics of Everyday Life is “epoch-marking rather than epoch-making.” This is especially important to say, I would argue, because many of the epoch-makers who first connected thick descriptions of everyday life to theological judgments (at least in Christian moral theology) are feminist and womanist ethicists who had to fight for this kind of work to be accepted in the academy. In her essay, Stephanie Mota Thurston highlights the work of Katie Cannon and Ada María Isasi-Díaz as two scholars using the tools of anthropology to mine the experience and moral wisdom of women in particular contexts, three decades before Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life . Alongside Thurston, other essays in Part I address what is missing in Banner’s book—consideration of both the scholarly history and methodological quandaries that continue to challenge conversations in and between religious ethics and social anthropology.

Engaging thick descriptions of everyday practices is not easily done within the methodological commitments of Christian moral theology—I find it challenging in my own work. The constructive essays of Part II pull this off with varying degrees of success. Still, essays such as Gregory’s (on humanitarianism, noted above) demonstrate why this kind of work is, to my mind, some of the best being done in moral theology right now: these scholars are working to realize the immense possibilities for doing confessionally-located work that is bound to, and chastened by, folks’ lived realities; they are de-centering and de-naturalizing previously assumed universal rationalities; they are lifting up the realities of marginalized persons not often given voice in historical texts.

Part III of Everyday Ethics takes up some of the methodological challenges for a moral theology that takes anthropological work seriously. Bringing these fields together opens new sites of encounter, and there are political ramifications here. Charles Mathewes, for example, argues that engaging with anthropology may be important for the manner in which we understand the relationship between the church and the world—not as the church against the world, but as the church for the world. Anthropology forces moral theology to get close to its subject, to question the naturalness of its assumptions, and in doing so to become open to the questions of others.

There is a humility in being open to the questions and claims of the other, and, as Patrick McKearney’s essay points out, there is the possibility of mutual transformation. Luke Bretherton’s essay, however, asks how we can both turn to culture and turn away from idolatrous structures and cultural processes. Thus the possibility of transformation is appealing when we might come close to, say, a refugee—when we are transformed by the otherness of one who has suffered violence and homelessness. Should we also be open to mutual transformation with a white-nationalist?

If you can feel the weight of that question, then you are beginning, I think, to see both the political power and the political challenge of the methodological task under concern in Everyday Ethics .

Eric Hilker is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

Everyday Ethics

• Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
• Ethics Resources
• Ethical Decision Making

"Have you taken the mandatory training for business ethics?" Dilbert's manager asks the popular comic strip engineer one day. Without missing a beat, Dilbert turns from his cubicle's computer and responds, "No, but if you say I did, then you'll save some money on training, which you can spend to decorate your office." Obviously taken with this suggestion, the manager says, "Luckily, I haven't taken the training myself." Dilbert adds, "I hear it's mostly common sense anyway."

The ethics Dilbert is talking about might be called everyday ethics. As philosopher Mike Martin notes, the moral aspects of day-to-day living are "more direct, persistent, and urgent" than the global moral issues — immigration, capital punishment, welfare reform — we might be at ease discussing over the dinner table.

"Why is that?" Martin asks. These topics, he says, "evoke our genuine concern, and sometimes they require our immediate action. Because we lack the authority to settle these issues, however, we can maintain a comfortable distance between us and them."

That distance — and the comfort that comes with it — diminishes when we make ethics part of our everyday reflection, asking ourselves, How am I doing at "the art of human being" as artist Laurel Birch describes it? Ethics is intimately bound up with that art because, at its heart, are human relationships.

How We Treat One Another In The Leadership Compass , John Wilcox and Susan Ebbs write, "Moral behavior is concerned primarily with the interpersonal dimension of our behavior: how we treat one another individually and in groups — and, increasingly, other species and the environment." The key here is that morality brings us into contact with others and asks us to consider the quality of that contact.

How many times have we asked ourselves: Is that the way I should treat someone else? Is that the way someone else should treat me? Because we have the ability to be critical of our interpersonal behavior and our contact with animals in the physical world, we have the ability to develop codes and norms to guide that behavior. Those moral norms and codes, plus a set of virtuous character traits, are what we mean when we talk about ethics.

Ethics poses questions about how we ought to act in relationships and how we should live with one another. Ethics asks us to consider whether our actions are right or wrong. It also asks us how those character traits that help humans flourish (such as integrity, honesty, faithfulness, and compassion) play out in everyday living.

Ethical norms and principles have developed over time and across cultures as rational people of goodwill consider human relationships and how human beings act when they are at their best.

In the past few years, I've had the chance to talk with hundreds of people about humanity at its best — and worst — including students, parents, educators, lawyers, engineers, physicians and allied health providers, journalists and television producers, CEOs, CFOs, managers and employees in all sorts of businesses, community leaders and community members at large, people rich and poor, and everyone in between. I've asked them to name the commonplace moral questions they confront in their day-to-day living or at work.

The Nitty-Gritty Just a few of their responses: Is it right to keep my mouth shut when I know a neighbor's child is getting into real trouble? How should I decide when it's time to put my parent in a nursing home? Do I release software I know isn't really ready? When's the right time to "let go" of my child? Is it right to be chronically late for meetings because I'm busy? Do I laugh at a sexist or racist joke? How ought I to love my spouse in the first year of marriage? In the 60th year?

Despite our many differences, we share these everyday questions; this is the common "stuff" of human living and interacting. We also share a hunger for ethical approaches to these questions. A Times-Mirror survey released a few years ago showed that, for the first time in a decade, Americans named ethics, or rather a decline in ethics, as one of the most important problems facing the United States, after crime, health care, and jobs. Ethics and drugs were tied for fourth and fifth place.

Most people would indeed like to live an ethical life and to make good ethical decisions, but there are several problems. One, we might call the everyday stumbling blocks to ethical behavior. Consider these: My small effort won't really make a difference. People may think badly of me. It's hard to know the right thing to do. My pride gets in the way. It may hurt my career. It just went by too quickly. There's a cost to doing the right thing.

Now, how would you respond if your own children were the ones making these excuses for their behavior? Oh, Mom, what I do won't really make a difference. Dad, I just didn't know what to do. Grandma, my friends won't like me. I won't get invited to anybody's home. I know I'll just never date again.

Put like this, ethics seems easier. But we still confront a practical obstacle--much as anti-smoking public service announcements did years ago. Research showed these ads were tremendously successful in getting people to recognize the addiction and want to kick the habit. The problem was that the ads didn't teach people how to do it.

The Five Questions: A Systematic Approach The same is true of ethics. People need a systematic way to approach living an ethical life. Here are five questions that, used daily, can help with the how-to of everyday morality.

Did I practice any virtues today? In The Book of Virtues , William Bennett notes that virtues are "habits of the heart" we learn through models--the loving parent or aunt, the demanding teacher, the respectful manager, the honest shopkeeper. They are the best parts of ourselves.

Ask yourself, Did I cross a line today that gave up one of those parts? Or was I, at least some of the time, a person who showed integrity, trustworthiness, honesty, compassion, or any of the other virtues I was taught as a child?

Did I do more good than harm today? Or did I try to? Consider the short term and long-term consequences of your actions.

Did I treat people with dignity and respect today? All human beings should be treated with dignity simply because they are human. People have moral rights, especially the fundamental right to be treated as free and equal human beings, not as things to be manipulated, controlled, or cast away.

How did my actions today respect the moral rights and the dignified treatment to which every person is entitled?

Was I fair and just today? Did I treat each person the same unless there was some relevant moral reason to treat him or her differently? Justice requires that we be fair in the way we distribute benefits and burdens. Whom did I benefit and whom did I burden? How did I decide?

Was my community better because I was in it? Was I better because I was in my community? Consider your primary community, however you define it--neighborhood, apartment building, family, company, church, etc. Now ask yourself, Was I able to get beyond my own interests to make that community stronger? Was I able to draw on my community's strengths to help me in my own process of becoming more human?

From Everyday Ethics to Moral Leadership This everyday ethical reflection must occur before we can effectively confront the larger moral questions. A person who wants to take moral leadership on global issues must, according to author Parker Palmer, "take special responsibility for what's going on inside his or her own self, inside his or her own consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good."

Palmer goes on to suggest that all of us can be leaders for good; the choice is ours:

We share a responsibility for creating the external world by projecting either a spirit of light or a spirit of shadow on that which is other than us. We project either a spirit of hope or a spirit of despair.... We have a choice about what we are going to project, and in that choice we help create the world that is.

Thomas Shanks, S.J., is executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and is currently working on a book about workplace ethics.

Further Reading

Halberstam, Joshua. Everyday Ethics: Inspired Solutions to Real-Life Dilemmas . New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

Martin, Mike W. Everyday Morality: An Introduction to Applied Ethics . 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1995.

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The significance of ethics and ethics education in daily life.

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Importance of Ethics in Everyday Life Annotated Bibliography

Introduction, annotation of selected sources.

Ethics are internationally recognized as a significant aspect of nurses’ work. In their daily activities, healthcare providers are faced with clinical issues and dilemmas related to decisions. Multidisciplinary collaboration can also raise questions on professional conduct and scope of role in providing patient-centered care. Simply defined, ethics are principles and values regarding defect human behavior and the moral norms that are acceptable for a specific occupational group when dealing with ambiguous situation. The rationale for establishing ethical conduct is to prevent and avoid harm to self and others. Nurses need to integrate values from social cultural groups, lived experiences, codes of conducts and court rulings in their daily practice.

Nurses are often confronted with choices that they need to make daily. Ethical issues often arise when the answers are not clear and none of the options is ideal. The nurse may want to make a decision but the institutional restrictions make it impossible to do what they think is best. The results of such mental constraints are moral distress of the professional caregiver, which can further lead to declined patient care and constrained clinical relationships. The central problem is that the nurse thinks that they know what to do in a specific context but are not able or permitted to proceed.

A good grasp of the nurses’ code of ethics can be useful in making decisions that are consistent with the quality of care and the obligation to the profession. However, there is paucity of studies that have been conducted on the topic. The research question for this paper is: For nurses working in a clinical setting, do accurate knowledge and interpretation of the nursing code of ethics, compared to ignorance of the code, result in less instances of moral dilemma? This paper provides a detailed annotation of some of the sources that will be included in writing this topic.

Rainer, J., Schneider, J. K., & Lorenz, R. A. (2018). Ethical dilemmas in nursing: An integrative review. Journal of clinical nursing, 27(19-20), 3446–3461. Web.

The background research of this source revealed that there are plenty of studies that have explored the concept of ethical dilemma in nursing practice. Similarly, many researchers have focused on the consequences of such moral issues on the profession. However, from the literature review it was apparent that there is paucity of credible sources that can guide ways of solving the dilemma. Therefore, the objective of the study is to find out the gaps and themes in that can enhance development of decision-making strategies for clinical nurses experiencing ethical dilemmas. This was an integrative review that included published research on related topic from 2000 to 2017.

Various databases were searched including CINAHL, OVID, SCOPUS, and OVID. Thirty-five sources were retained and synthesized using the Garrard’s matrix. Findings indicate that moral dilemmas arise in different circumstances mostly when dealing with end of life, organizational constraints, conflict with physicians and families and policy concerns. The study concluded that there is need for more studies that can compare practices across different settings and the role of nurses.

At the time of the publication, two of the researchers were pursuing their master at Saint Louis University while one was studying at University of Buffalo. This is a scholarly study intended to meet the academicians and professions in clinical setting, especially the nurses. This source is relevant to the current study as it provides evidence on the issues in nursing practice that are most likely to result in ethical dilemma. The information from the study will be integrated in the literature review by explaining how circumstances such as end of life; role confusion or conflict can cause moral distress. The source is also useful in pointing to the common themes on the topic.

Knowledge of the context help to focus the study by identifying a gap that needs to be filled. Compared to all the sources included in this annotation this study has high level of evidence since it is an integrative review that synthesized different credible research findings.

Steck Wilson, M. B., & Rice, J. G., (2018). The Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements. South Carolina Nurses Association.

This article elaborates the Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements (Code) for the American Nurses Association’s (ANA). The code provides the standards for individual conduct as well as the best practices for the entire nursing profession. The obligations stipulated in the code are comprised of provisions which are non-contextual but relevant for various settings. According to Steck et al. (2018) provisions 1-3 of the ANA offer the fundamental values and nurses’ commitment to the patient. From 4-6 concerns loyalty and duty of the profession while 7-9 has provision for the responsibility of nurses beyond the encounters with individual clients.

There are 39 interpretive statements to guide nurses on how they can adhere by the requirements. The source further explains the relevance of the code to nurses in South Carolina who are working with bedridden patients and newly expanded roles. The conclusion is that matters of morals in the profession are urgent and therefore the nursing leadership of SC is continually committed to establishment and the revision of the ANA.

The authors of this study, Wilson and Rice are both registered nurse leaders who hold a doctoral degree. The implication is that they are both experienced and have knowledge that gives them credibility to write on the topic. The paper has also been published by a credible organization which means that it was peer-reviewed to confirm credibility. The primary target audience includes those people who are either pursuing nursing or are already in practice.

The relevance of this source to the current paper is that it gives accurate and objective standards of ethics that can be followed by registered nurses in practice. The interpretation makes it easy to understand the requirements of each provision and its application in real life setting. This source is, thus, important in writing the literature review. Furthermore, the source will be relevant in writing the introduction and defining key terms. It will also aid in relating an ethical dilemma to the applicable code to provide evidence-based recommendations for resolving conflicts. Compared with other sources this paper provides objective information pertaining to the code.

Hyatt, K. (2020). Ethical guidance for nursing decision making. Tennessee nurse extra, 43.

The article starts by defining moral distress as emotional state arising from a situation in which the nurse feels that there is incongruence between the ethically correct action and what is required of them to do in a particular situation. The article then explains some of the virtues in the American Nurses Association including dignity, caring, generosity, moral equality, kindness, respect, prudence, equality and transparency. The article further stipulates the characteristics of what is expected for good nurses including the skills, wisdom, knowledge and integrity as implied by the ANA. The recommendation for nurses during practice are listed to help aid the professionals in a dilemma.

It is expected that the nurse will practice patient-centered care, take responsibility, remain competence, promote prompt responsiveness. Seven principles must guide nurse during their practice including autonomy, beneficence, accountability, veracity, nonmaleficence, and justice. The article elaborates on several requirements for moral conduct with an aim of ensuring that the nurses are not strained emotionally during practice.

The author of this article is an assistant professor of nursing at University of Arkansas of Monticello. She is also a registered nurse who holds a masters degree which shows that her opinion is authentic. Besides, the author has integrated various scholarly sources to back-up the evidences. The target of the article is nurses and students specializing in health sciences. The paper can also be relevant for those interested in legal matters on health.

This source is relevant in writing the introduction and defining some key terms such as moral distress and emotional stress. The article also provides additional information on principles which will be integrated in the literature review. Also, when providing recommendation this article will offer factual information for future researchers to build on. Compared to other sources this paper has a lower level of evidence since it is reliant on expert opinion.

The topic of nursing ethics continues to raise new controversies that affect the performance of nurses due to emotional distress. The current study seeks to add to the current body of research and hopefully fill a knowledge gap. The annotation from the three sources will provide evidence of issues and solutions to the dilemmas that nurses experience daily. Integrating multiple scholarly articles will also provide the wisdom needed by professionals in this field to be competent in dealing with patients, their relatives and the organization that they work. The sources have been selected based on their high levels of credibility and the qualifications of the authors.

Rainer, J., Schneider, J. K., & Lorenz, R. A. (2018). Ethical dilemmas in nursing: An integrative review . Journal of clinical nursing, 27(19-20), 3446–3461. Web.

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Bibliography

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Ethics in Everyday Life Essay Examples

The essence of ethics: understanding its significance.

What is ethics? How have philosophers defined the term? In what is ethics essay these questions will be answered. The word Ethics is defined in different aspects. We humans are surrounded by dilemmas, curiosity, and questions in life. Ethics derived from ethikos (Greek word) which...

Ethical Dilemma: Ways to Solve It

To start ethical dilemma essay lets understand the terminology of this phrase. Ethical dilemma is a basically a problem in a decision-making process between possible options. These options can be approved from an ethical view, this can be extremely challenging for companies or employers. Ethical...

Ethics and Morality: a Discussion on Right and Wrong

To start with, this is why should we be moral essay where answers to such questions as:iIs it possible for a person to be moral but not ethical or ethical but not moral? and Why should we be moral? So, Yes, it is possible to...

The Power of Netiquette: Guiding Principles in Online Communication

Social media usage over the years has sky-rocketed resulting in the creation of more social media platforms. Through the use of social media, more individuals have more access to information and quickly communicate their thoughts and ideas to each other. In sharing our thoughts and...

Comparative Analysis of Codes of Ethics Apple Inc. and Samsung Companies

If we are going to talk about ethics, we need to know what that is. Ethics is related to the study of moral and the human actions. An ethical sentence is a moral statement that elaborates affirmations and define what is good or bad, what...

Analysis of the Movie Gone Baby Gone Through Kant’s Perspectives

Gone Baby Gone is an enthusiastic film with different great decisions, that will leave everybody looking at their ethical standards. Is it immaculate to take a pre-adult from their trademark parent and give the tyke to an all the all the all the more supporting...

Ethics and Corporate Governance

Identify and discuss with clear examples the governance mechanisms that were lacking / deficient in Ireland during the financial crisis, according to the Nyberg report. The Nyberg report was published in April 2011 outlining the causes of the systemic banking crisis in Ireland. It covers...

Analysis of Societal Issues in the Film Zootopia

In spite of the overwhelming success of the film, Zootopia was originally supposed to have a completely different protagonist. The movie was going to revolve around Nick Wilde and his journey of proving he didn’t commit a crime he was framed for. All of the...

The Debate of Relativism Versus Objectivism

I am here today to describe the basics of ethics and explain arguments concerning objectivism vs. relativism. I will also be covering the normative theory as well as normative ethics. We will be digging into one of the major normative theories as well as explaining...

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