This week’s reading contained a lot of common sense information about being ethical. However, I still feel like there is a lot of gray area with ethics on topics dealing with the environment and examples like Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt. And obviously, everyone is going to have a different opinion on what is ethical and what isn’t.
Like the reading says, we are all pretty aware of right and wrong and how to make good decisions, but what about the way we treat people or things around us? I’m sure most people would consider themselves to be ethical, but what happens when being ethical keeps a certain individual from getting what they want? Can they still resist the temptation to just take what they want and forget about everyone else? The reading talks about this and I think it is the biggest issue for someone trying to make ethical decisions. For example, what if I built a house and during the process burned the extra/scrap material that was laying around. Is this better for the environment compared to throwing it in a dumpster and letting it sit a landfill for the next zillion years? I certainly don’t know.
The Einstein example was also pretty interesting. He used his knowledge to help point out that the Germans could be developing atomic weapons and the U.S. should do that same, in order to be safe. This example really illustrates how being ethical to help one side, can later turn out to be bad. When making decisions like this, how is someone supposed to know what will happen in the future? While developing atomic weapons isn’t the most ethical thing in the world, it allowed for the creation of nuclear power plants, which is very clean and easy on the environment. It just keeps going in circles, I don’t know what to think!
Relativity R14
You ask “how is someone supposed to know what will happen in the future?” I think the answer is a simple one. You can’t know the future. If even Albert Einstein has an internal struggle of ethics on which choice to make then I think that it’s safe to say that most of us are going to have to struggle as well. Sometimes all you can do is some soul-searching and rely on what your family, cultural, and religious values tell you to do, because ultimately it’s your decision and it falls on you. Luckily none of us have to decide whether to advocate a nuclear war, we just need to write a white paper. Hooray for gray area.
Shane
Knowing the future
Shane is right – we can never know the future. With that being said, though, I think Einstein could have certainly anticipated that nuclear research and atomic weapons had the potential for destructive and dangerous outcomes (I mean, it's not that big of a leap for one of us, let alone Einstein!). And I think this brings up another point that's central to ethical considerations. We can't just look at the black and white of what we're actually doing, but we have to consider the implications of our actions, too. What we're doing may not actually be wrong, just as there was nothing wrong with writing a letter to the president advocating a certain kind of research. But if our initial action sets off a chain of reactions, we have to take these reactions and their results into account when making ethical decisions.
Kristin
choices
Like you just said, “…we have to consider the implications of our actions…” This is what I meant by thinking about the future when we make an ethical decision. We can make a choice but we still need to think about possible implications in the future, it's just hard to do. If we made all our decisions based on how we feel in the current moment, we would make a lot of mistakes. I think we are better off thinking about how a situation will play out before we actually make a choice. Of course, this isn’t the case with every decision we make, but rather decisions similar to Einstein’s dilemma.
Future
While we might not know what will happen in the near future we can definitely predict it based on the action we take. If the decision is really important, I believe it is a given that we have put a lot of thought into it. If we plan on throwing away extra material it might not mean anything or we could recycle it or just donate it to some housing project if the material is still useful. Most of the time we will know what the right thing to do is, it is just fighting temptation and that might not be as easy for some.
The supplemental laws of the governance of mankind
The best way I look at ethics is that they are basically the supplemental laws of the governance of mankind. Well obviously this leaves some room for opinions. Ethics can be a grey area and are sometimes hard to draw the line. However, in the business world in order to “CYA” it’s best to not take things lightly. If you even think remotely something is ethically wrong, it probably should be taken that way. This should definitely be considered also when doing any audience analysis. Consider what different ethical viewpoints different audiences may have. This will help to address things from all angles.