Ethics and Morals
When people function in any social environment they are expected to follow certain rules and expectations that govern in a particular society or community. In this view, there are certain principles that regulate one's behavior or performance, which are generally called as ethics. These governing principles may be also determined as ready guidelines on what to do and what not to do in specific situations that occur in personal, academic, and professional domains. Consequently, being ethical means that a person is aware of the rules that should be followed in order to be accepted as a member of certain relationships, including friendship, professional association, and academic affiliation. This acceptance is one of the factors for personal, professional and academic growth of an individual, because he or she becomes connected with others through ethics that are constructed by moral principles.
In my own experience, I encountered many ethical dilemmas that required following moral principles mostly on the personal levels. Most of them were connected with confidentiality. Very often my friends share their
secrets and concerns that they want to remain undiscovered to the third parties. This was a kind of a deal that became an ethical issue that had to be approached accordingly (Newton, 1998). At the same time, there were many temptations to use that information for a variety of reasons, including maintaining case analysis conversation or use weak sides of my friends for some occasional benefit. At these moments I had to battle between my moral principles to stay neutral to those secrets and use them as mechanisms of influence. In the result, my moral principles were always on the top of my decision making. This is the example of postconventional morality (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2007), in which I have always tried to protect one’s right to
confidentiality.
My general education courses have greatly contributed to my ethical values. First of all, they provided me with a deeper insight into the challenges, and examples of ethical dilemmas in various domains, and how these issues can be resolved by the appeal to moral reasoning. In this view, I believe that college-educated person carries a greater responsibility for his or her actions than anyone not educated because of the knowledge about the world that one obtains, or at least is expected to obtain, during the academic process. Eventually, this knowledge carries responsibility for knowing what is right and what is wrong, which further reveals in personal honor and duty to society to foster adherence to moral principles.
References
Newton, L. (1998). Doing good and avoiding evil. In Hale Chair in Applied Ethics. Retrieved from: http://www.rit.edu/~w-ethics/resources/manuals/dgae1p7.html
McDevitt, T. M., & Ormrod, J. E. (2007). Kohlberg’s three levels and six stages of moral reasoning. In Child Development and Education, (p. 518). Retrieved from:
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