Ethics

This week in class we discussed ethics, a term just as ambiguous and difficult to define as leadership itself.  Like "leadership", the problem with "ethics" is that it is a term that is largely dependent on peoples' personal views and beliefs.  However, for the purposes of the class (and this discussion) ethics will be judged by Kitchner's 5 Ethical Principles, which is a guideline of five conditions that can be used to determine the ethical validity of something.  I have never analyzed parts of my life in such a way before, but doing so is really quite interesting.

I will be honest and admit that I have written papers that fall somewhere along the range of plagiarism.  It is a fact of life-everyone does it at some point.  Yet, what seems an obviously unethical action falls somewhere more in the gray region according to Kitchner's model.  It is obvious that plagiarizing fails faithfulness and justice-it defeats the purpose of building trust between the student and teacher, and arguably most important it is not fair to other students.  However, it does not really fail the other tests either.  For example, while plagiarizing does not benefit the group, it certainly does no harm either.  It also does not restrict choice-students can choose to do the right thing or not, and teachers have the option of designing assignments to make them harder to plagiarize.

On the other hand, what might seem like an ethical decision may actually not be.  Recently there was a debate in my hometown concerning the last remaining mobile home park in town.  Due to skyrocketing real estate prices and wealth my hometown has created a general plan envisioning a near-utopian city which included replacing the mobile home park with (another) upscale shopping center, effectively erasing the last available option for low-income residents.  I was active in trying to save the mobile home park, which to me was very obviously the right thing to do.  Yet, according to Kitchner that was a debatable action, since the mobile home park is an obstacle to the development of the city into a nice place for everyone, and it removed freedom of choice since the landowner would not be allowed to sell the mobile home park at all and the city would not be able to move forward with its plans.

Upon analyzing some of my past actions it is interesting to see that what is assumed to be ethical is not always, and vice versa.  It is not always possible to fit all five of Kitchner's principles definitively, and as a result many things actually fall into a "gray area" in which ethics can be hotly debated.  I suppose that that is one downfall of Kitchner's model, considering that no model is perfect.