Admitting You Have a Problem

Maura Anderson
ma857214@ohio.edu

Ethical decision making is a process that transcends the bubble of journalistic integrity. Every person on this Earth will face countless decisions every single day, and those decisions can be as simple as what shirt to wear to class or as complex and vexing as judging a murder trial. Developing a personal code of ethics or following an established list of rules can seem like the best way to combat unethical decisions, but sometimes, decisions must happen more quickly or might seem so insignificant that consulting a code or peer doesn't happen.

We are all multifaceted individuals, and as such, we all have different, perhaps conflicting, loyalties. In the most basic sense, when we make decisions, we usually have to choose between these loyalties. Most allegiances can be broken down into two categories: devotion to self, and responsibility to others. In the following video from Academic Technologies at the University of Texas at El Paso, consider the case of the tribesman who made a life-changing decision.


Here, we see that the choice of individual over community was catastrophic. This brings up the point that typically, if we voice our concern to our peers and ask for their input beforehand, we can make more informed decisions.

Sometimes, people make decisions that seem downright foolish or negligent, but according to the Harvard Business Review, there are three reasons why ethical decision making is often abandoned in the hustle and bustle of daily life.

The first is that we often don't even identify ethical problems when we make decisions. In training exercises, an ethical dilemma is laid out for you, but in real life, you can make and act on a decision before you even realize that it might have negative consequences. This happens because choices are not as cut and dry as we might like them. Every choice we make is one in an endless series, all of which affect each other, no matter how insignificant they seem. Because we face so many decisions, isolating the ethical component of one single decision can be extremely difficult.

Another issue that surrounds ethical decision making is that humans can't help but seek approval. Therefore, we're frequently surrounded by like-minded people who may have the same goals and opinions. In the workplace, coworkers have the same desire to please their superiors or their clients, even if that means no one brings up a conflicting point of view.

Via Pinterest. Courtney Cox as Monica Geller on Friends

Harvard Business Review identifies a third issue in ethical decision making, which is time. We're all busy, and we can be too preoccupied to even notice an ethical conundrum, let alone spend time on it.

Even if we identify a challenge and receive feedback from different viewpoints, we still might not have time to dissect the issue before we're called upon to make the choice. This leads people to fall back on routine, even if routine has not prepared them for such a predicament. While gut instinct can be a helpful tool in identifying ethical dilemmas, it's in the decision making stage that they are typically acted on too quickly. Intuition can overlook an outside perspective that might be more reasonable.

Knowing these issues of ethical decision making can help us combat them. If we admit that we have loyalties and process what our choices mean to each of them, we can better serve ourselves and those we're responsible for. By identifying problems, seeking guidance, and taking the time to digest the dilemmas, our decisions can be much more thought out.