Within a professional capacity in the communications’ field working for a fortune five hundred food company, I imagine that I may come across some ethical dilemmas.
Perhaps there will be food re-calls, where I am privy to information before others and must decide on how much information to share and when.
Reflecting on the scandal of the Tylenol recall from the 1980s could be used to learn from in those cases. If you’ll remember, that was when the company Johnson and Johnson decided to promote public safety over market share when they recalled 100 million dollars worth of Tylenol bottles after finding out that capsules in bottles were tampered with after being shelved causing the death of several people.
I would think that knowing about similar past dilemmas or even having experienced a few yourself would be most helpful in working out ethical dilemmas. I would have thought that a religious upbringing were a solid moral foundation was implicit would help as well. However, after reading the start of Media Ethics: Issues and Cases, I’m realizing that isn’t quite true. The author of Media Ethics: Issues and Cases frames this by saying that morals descend from religious beliefs, while ethics stem from agreed upon principles shaped by rational thought. “Ethics is just as often about the choices between good and better or poor and worse than about right and wrong, which tends to be the domain of morals.”
It seems at best that morality lines are blurred when ethics come into play. For instance, the picture by Stanley Foreman shown in Chap 1 from Media Ethics: Issues and Cases, is certainly morally debase to some viewers, but yet captivating to others for that same reason – so the morality is blurred; we know its wrong to appreciate the death scene, yet we see a captured moment in the photo that appeals to our senses which brings the debate of ethics into play.
Our text takes from the learning of philosophers like Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, teaching that exploring the thought process behind Kants, “categorical imperative,” or Aristoles, “golden rule,” can help you determine your course of action in a dilemma that raises ethical questions by applying thought instead of reaction to a dilemma.
That is the most important thing to discover, that when dealing with ethics, you shouldn’t just make a decision based on beliefs or conscience, but instead on assessing the impact of factors your course of action will cause by the direction you take to solve the dilemma, while also taking into consideration each possible path to reach a means that will justify the ends for you and those in the society around you.
As a natural born leader, I tend to react quickly when faced with a dilemma, often boxing a scenario into black and white to do so. Reading about giving more logical thought to dealing with dilemmas now has given me pause to reflect on this. For instance, just last week my friend got out of my car and accidentally dinged the car door parked in the next spot. The owner of the car was in it at the time, and he jumped out of the car and flipped out at us – aggressively asserting that my friend had no manners, or respect for property while demanding an apology from my friend. My friend shouted back about how accidents happen, and he is superficial to be so upset about a car ding. I stepped in and reminded them that there was only two solutions here, my friend apologizes for the accident and we see if any physical damage was done that we could repair, OR we raise our blood pressure by fighting and get nowhere until authorities step in (we were in a parking lot that happened to have security patrol btw).
They didn’t want to listen, and preferred to yell at each other, so I wiped at the car door and the ding mark came off, and everyone finally settled down and walked away – no apologizes were given for their behavior though. I asked my friend later why she couldn’t have just said sorry from the start, and she said she felt attacked and got defensive as a knee jerk reaction.
So often we find ourselves in a position that calls for an immediate response, and there isn’t time to ponder the situation and how best to handle it. We re-act to feelings that are provoked by a situation, so I find it hard to imagine being able to pause and use logical thought processes before reacting. I guess we’ll see if our text can really help us achieve that by giving us tools to reflect upon as a matter of course that will become habit.
No comments:
Post a Comment