Coaching Matters - Leadership: Facing Moral and Ethical Dilemmas, Vol IV#4, pg5

How to solve an ethical dilemma

Peter Drucker (2001) refers to the Hippocratic oath of 2500 years ago in his writing about business ethics. A professional should promise he or she will “not knowingly do harm.” He states that it is not an easy rule to live up to, but that “its very modesty and self-constraint make it the right rule for the ethics that managers need, the ethics of responsibility.”
Given that ethical and moral dilemmas present themselves on a daily basis, what do the experts say are the steps for solving an ethical dilemma? Life and business are rarely simple, and between right and wrong there is a lot of gray area.
There are two major approaches that philosophers use in handling ethical dilemmas. One is to focus on the practical consequences of what we do, and the other focuses on the actions themselves and the rightness of the action alone. The first school of thought argues “no harm, no foul.” The second claims that some actions are simply wrong in and of themselves.

Here is a three-step process for solving an ethical problem:

Step One: Analyze the consequences
Who will be helped by what you do?
Who will be harmed?
What kind of benefits and harms are we talking about? (Some are more valuable or more harmful than others: good health, someone’s trust and a clean environment are very valuable benefits, more so than a faster remote control device.)
How does all of this look over the long run as well as the short run?

Step Two: Analyze the actions.
Consider all of the options from a different perspective, without thinking about the consequences.
How do the actions measure up against moral principles like honesty, fairness, equality, respecting the dignity of others, people’s rights?
Do any of the actions “cross the line?”
If there’s a conflict between principles or between the rights of different people involved, is there a way to see one principle as more important than the others?
Which option offers actions that are least problematic?

Step Three: Make a decision
Take both parts of your analysis into account and make a decision.

Source: www.ethicsandbusiness.org/strategy.htm
The Center for Business and Ethics
at Loyola Marymount University


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