Decision help: What makes an ethical decision or issue ethical? - Help.com

Ethics?

When you are making a decision that involves morals. Let’s say there is a pregnant woman who will die if she gives birth to a baby that is about to come out. You can kill the baby or let the baby come out and the mother dies. You have to decide whose life is worth more or which one dies and which one lives… This is an ethical decision.

Lets say you run a hospital and you have a list of people who need a heart transplant. You have one heart. The people who need it include someone who has AIDS, someone who has smoked two packs a day since they were 12, or someone who is already 80 years old. Who gets the heart?

The answer is usually the person who has the most money unfortunately…

Ethical behavior implies that you are committed to fairness, so that no one has an unfair advantage over another. For example, you are sitting on a city planning board that is considering a new road from point A to point B. You happen to own land that would shoot up in value if the road is completed. If you are an ethical person, you would recuse yourself from the vote, because it would be a conflict of interest for you.

Some organizations develop codes of ethics. These codes will ALWAYS fail, because they are either too specific or too vague.

If you really want ethical behavior, you have to legislate it. People, left to themselves, will almost always choose the way that gives them an advantage over others.