Individual Assignments

Personal Values and Decision Making

Yingrui Li

Liyingrui1992@hotmail.com

306: Ethics and Leadership

Instructor: David Lambert

Individual Assignments

August 15, 2014

Nowadays there are a lot of things happened in our life, and when we faced some problems we need to make decisions to solve them. In fact, different people have different core values. When we make some decisions, we usually rely on someone’s core value. If people faced the same problem, their decisions are very different. So core values are playing a very important role in our life.

When we faced the ethical dilemmas, we need to use the core values to help us to make correct decisions. I used to experience one thing when I was in the high school. There is one time for our English exam, and I was the subject representative at that time. After the exam, the teacher got the sick so I need to help him to correct the test paper. And there was one girl, she knows a correct answer for one question, so she told me that give the paper to her and she wants to correct her answers, and also she said I just correct one answer and the teacher won’t know if herself and me won’t tell anyone especially the teacher, and no one will know that. And at that time, I did not know whether or not I should help her, so I try to use my core values which are truth to help me to make the decision. Therefore, I decide that I would not help me to change the answers on the paper, because it was as same as I stole the money from our teacher. After I told my decision to her, she was unhappy, but she told me that she understood she and me said if she were me, she also would not help others. In this situation my personal value that is truth really helps me to make a better decision.

People usually will go through four steps that are defining the problems, developing alternatives, evaluating the alternatives and making the decision to make a decision and those steps are related with personal principles, because different...