Moral Values: The Standards Of Ethical Dilemmas

Ethics is the way that we try to lives our life base on the standard of what’s right or wrong. Those standards are based on beliefs by which judgments are made about good or bad behavior. Your personal moral standards are built up over your lifetime. It affects the choices you make in your life. Standards of ethical behavior are absorbed by seeing the examples of everybody around you. When many people share similar standards in the society, those standards become values and value system. Value can be expressed in two ways: intrinsic value and instrumental value. Intrinsic value is a value that itself is a good thing and it is pursued for its own sake. Meanwhile, instrumental value is the value that we can use it like a good tool to reach another

And when you are facing a lot of choices you need to satisfy four listed requirements. Resolving ethical dilemmas is not about give a satisfactory answer but it will lead to two distinct approaches to handling ethical dilemmas. One is to focus only to the practical consequence and another one focuses on actions themselves. To deal with an ethical dilemma, we can follow 3 simple steps which are predicting both beneficial and harmful effects on relevant things , carefully thinking about all aspects of possible course of actions that we might carry out and then making up your mind. Besides, we also have 8 specific directions to solve it. Searching for information connected with our problem as much as we can, carefully predicting which facts are not present, selecting and making information become meaningful to us, looking at the issue from various angles to help us make a better choice, taking all possible outcomes and effects into consideration as we take some particular action, asking your heart, beliefs and feelings about that ethical problem-this may be a useful method when our mind is confused, questioning ourselves about who we really are in order to find the best choice matching our lifestyle and making a final decision after we put ourselves in other people’

This process moves through three moral developing levels, which are divided into six different stages. The first lowest level is “Preconventional” directly linked to the expectation of punishment at Stage 1: Obedience and punishment orientation or focusing on one’s own needs (reward) at Stage 2: Individualism, instrumentalism, and exchange. The second level is “Conventional” where people is getting aware of social influences by focusing on pleasing family members at Stage 3: Good boy/nice girl orientation, or on one’s social membership and the codes of behavior at Stage 4: Law-and-order orientation. The highest level is “Postconventional” reaching individual moral values at Stage 5: Social contract legalistic orientation or even higher at Stage 6: Universal ethical principle orientation. In short, Kohlberg believes that people can arrive at the decisions at different moral levels built on their cumulative life