Ethics

Thinking Ethically

By Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez

Moral issues greet us each morning in the newspaper and bid us farewell on the evening news. We are bombarded daily with questions about the morality of surrogate motherhood, the legitimacy of publicizing the names of AIDS victims, the ethics of exposing the private lives of political candidates, the justice of welfare and the rights of the homeless.

Dealing with these moral issues is often perplexing. How, exactly, do we think through an ethical issue? What questions should we ask? What factors should we consider?

The first step in analyzing moral issues is an obvious one: get all the facts. Some moral issues create controversies simply because people do not bother to check out the facts. This first step of analysis, although obvious, is also the most important one and the one that is most frequently overlooked.

But having the facts is not enough. Facts by themselves only tell us what is; they do not tell us what ought to be. In addition to getting the facts, resolving an ethical issue also requires an appeal to values. Three kinds of value systems have been developed by philosophers to deal with moral issues. One such system is called "utilitarianism."

Utilitarianism was developed in the nineteenth century by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to help legislators determine which laws were the morally best ones. Both Bentham and Mill suggested that ethical actions are those that provide the greatest balance of good over evil. To analyze an issue using the utilitarian approach, we must first identify the various courses of action available to us. Second, we must ask who will be affected by each action and what benefits or harm will be derived from each action. And third, we choose the course of action that will produce the greatest benefits and the least harm. The ethical action is the one that provides "the greatest good for the greatest number."

The second important approach to ethics is one...