Ethics: Situational or Invariant to Circumstances?

Gough and Price’s “Developing Ethical Decision-Making Skills: How Textbooks Fail Students” and Dombrowski’s “Can Ethics Be Technologized? Lessons from Challenger, Philosophy, and Rhetoric” present ethics very differently from one another.

Gough and Price clearly state that good ethics should prelude the situational context:

If we were to suggest (mistakenly) that all ethical decisions could vary from one individual to another and from one circumstance to another, then consistent ethical advice would be difficult if not impossible. The mistake here is confusing propriety (which may change by circumstance) with sound ethical decisions (which are invariant to circumstances). (p. 324)

Gough and Price make several points here. Firstly, there is a difference between propriety and sound ethical decisions. While propriety may vary from individual to individual or circumstance to circumstance, ethics may not. These pre-existing ethics may be applied to different situations, certainly, but their existence always precludes the situation.

Dombrowski’s paper, on the other hand, presents several examples which suggest that ethics are situated in the personal and contextual. Dombrowski discusses two examples of situations that were based on following procedural ethics: the Challenger disaster and Sophist teaching. Dombrowksi argues that ethical systems like these are fallacious because they do not take the personal into account. Dombrowski then suggests that Socrates’ view on ethics is more correct. Dombrowski writes that Socrates held that good ethical conduct was impossible to teach and differed depending on the situation:

Socrates also held that virtue—ethical conduct—could not be taught because it too could not be reduced to a set of rules. Ethics could not be reduced to technai because of the uniqueness of every situation. Instead, the right thing to do had to be determined in each particular situation, a determination that required the engagement of real individuals earnestly arguing according to their own enlightenment. (p. 335)

Socrates’ view on ethics is significantly different from Gough and Price’s view on ethics: for Gough and Price, ethics preclude the situation; for Socrates, ethics had to be based on the unique situation.

Dombrowski concludes that: “[Ethics] is not a fixed set of rules but an ongoing human activity that must continually be thrashed out for particular circumstances and people. This is not to say that nothing can be said about ethics in general, only that the difficult business of arguing between competing values cannot entirely be circumvented” (p. 337).

I believe that it is possible to merge both the ideas from Gough and Price’s paper and the ideas from Dombrowksi’s paper. Ethical guidelines that preclude situational context (be truthful, be compassionate, have a concern for human rights, advocate justice, etc.) can be applied uniquely in different situations. But the overarching values should not change. Otherwise, as Gough and Price point out, people will be implicated in perpetrating hypocrisy and inconsistency (p. 324).

 

Dombrowski, P. M. “Can ethics be technologized? Lessons from Challenger, philosophy, and rhetoric.”

Gough, J. and Price, A. “Developing ethical decision-making skills: How textbooks fail students.”