Moral Living

The below question is what is asked of me this week:


Reflect on the three key lessons you take away from the course. Reflect on your perceived value of this course.

This is a difficult question to answer as if you try to isolate three components of morality I feel that you’re missing something. Morality and ethical living are less lessons and more a way of life. You can focus on a component such as crime and punishment or gun control. You can examine policies such as affirmative action or euthanasia. You can even study philosophies such as deontology or consequentialism and still miss the point. Taking a deontological or consequentialist view of a given moral quandary may provide a foundation from which to deconstruct affirmative action or euthanasia but it doesn’t provide the impetus to do anything about it.

Instead, what I take away from studying ethics and morality is that it is a constant process. There are more than two ways, or even four or five ways to look at a given problem. Every choice will have consequences and every choice can harm or help the greater number of people. You can serve the greater good and still hurt individuals. You can help individuals and hurt the greater good. Morality isn’t a black and white adventure it’s a constant shifting of variables and conflicting values that must be weighed against your own view of morality. I do hold that there are moral truths and that moral relativity can be a lazy excuse to avoid offending someone. Nothing in this course has made me think otherwise regarding relativity. Just because a culture has a norm that subjugates women doesn’t make it morally correct even if one can find women in that culture that agree with subjugation. What minimizes one of us ultimately minimizes all of us.

Despite my protestations over moral relativity the study of ethics is invaluable, especially to anyone that wants to lead. One has to reflect on all points of view and assign them value and that cannot be done without a frame of reference in which to operate. This is why I usually find the lessons on the philosophies themselves to be of the greatest use. Additionally, studying racism and policies such as affirmative action are invaluable as they force one to look at something other than themselves. Anyone that says they oppose affirmative action as they themselves are not racist and slaves are no longer owned is missing the point. They are making it about themselves.









Morality isn’t about how you effect yourself but how you effect the world around you. Even those of that love isolating still need others to produce a society safe and healthy enough to sit in splendid isolation. We are a social species and while doing good things may feel good (and thus be about one’s self) the inescapable fact is that someone else was also affected. Studying ethics forces you to look at the bigger picture. I honestly feel that if you simply seek you better yourself through moral living you have it backwards. Instead one can study ethics in order to be better for others and by natural consequence be better yourself.

Gun Control: An Uneasy Balance

Gun Control: An Uneasy Balance

In the Practice of Ethics LaFollette attempts to answer if gun ownership is a right and he does so by balance a right against the safety of society (LaFollette, 2007). And I do tend to agree that owning a weapon is not a fundamental right in an ethical sense. LaFollette states that owning a gun does not advance a person in such a fashion as to improve their life or maintain their life (LaFollette, 2007) whereas food and access to shelter and clothing are fundamental rights a gun does not advance those rights, it can merely defend them.  Additionally citizenry can form together for protection and establish governments to provide for common interest and protection. All of that being said the right to self-defense is a fundamental right and in a country awash in firearms debating if they are fundamental rights is akin to closing the barn door after the horses have long left.

The gun control argument in the United States is one that is consistently re-ignited after one of the frequent mass shootings the US endures.  The problem is so prevalent that, for the US, one can find lists of mass shootings categorized by year. This post will not concern itself with discussing whether or not there is a problem with gun deaths in the US.  The CDC lists 33,726 firearm related deaths in its most current data. If another country were killing 33,000 US citizens a year there would be a call for war. The gun control argument is often subject to many false comparisons and logical fallacies. There are those that argue vehicles kill about the same number of people per year. While this may be true a vehicle’s sole purpose is not to kill or injure; and fatalities occur when a car is used improperly. Such fallacies can be discarded.

When discussing gun control it is better to focus on the statistics from guns themselves. There is a correlation between states that are considered to have looser firearm regulations (largely states that lean Right in governance) and firearm deaths: states that have looser restrictions on firearms tend to have greater numbers of per capita gun deaths.  Cities that border states with loose gun control laws, like Chicago does Indiana, also have high numbers of gun deaths as weapons are easily transportable across state lines. Hawaii, which is an island and has strict gun control laws, has the lowest number of per capita gun deaths.  Hawaii also has the benefit of being able to control its borders. The argument that gun control does not work is intellectually dishonest. While many who argue for gun control use other countries as examples and indeed Japan, Australia, Canada, France, The UK, and a host of other First World nations do have gun control laws and low gun death numbers; Hawaii is a US state.

The argument isn’t if gun control works because it can if it is evenly applied. The argument is how much regulation is appropriate. In Heller vs District of Columbia the Supreme Court ruled that states can regulate access to firearms.  This is balanced against the Second Amendment which allows for the private ownership of weapons.

Is it ethical to restrict firearm ownership? Yes it is. There are already restrictions on what a private person can legally own. You won’t see nuclear weapons listed for sale alongside pistols in your local gun store and access to automatic weapons or surplus military hardware is subject to very strict controls. It is ethical to restrict speech in the interest of public safety as there are laws against inciting riots or libel and slander. If one amendment can be restricted for safety than all can be restricted for safety to suggest that nothing be limited negates the point of having a law against anything. The argument that the second amendment is inviolate is emotional rather than logical. While there is a right to own firearms there can be limitations on what type and of what capacity. We have an ethical obligation to see to the safety of each other and the argument that large numbers of private firearm ownership guarantees that safety is also easily discarded. Anecdotal evidence that private firearm ownership prevents crime is easy to find. It makes sense that in a country where firearms outnumber the population the law of averages dictates that sooner or later a person will stop a crime. Actual, empirical evidence suggests that increased gun ownership increases the chances of crime (Pappas, 2015).

We are left with the usual detriment of democracy; that somehow an argument based on emotion and bad information is somehow equal to one based on reason and evidence.  Evidence strongly suggests that unregulated firearm ownership is hazardous to the safety of society. If we accept that it is morally ethical to wish that a society is safe than we must place limits on what people can and can’t do with weapons. If a person wishes to argue that the individual desires are placed above the safety of a society than they are arguing from a position of selfishness.

LaFollette, H. (2007). The practice of ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

All Injuries. (n.d.). Retrieved December 08, 2016, from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm

Firearm Mortality by State: 2014. (n.d.). Retrieved December 08, 2016, from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm.htm

Hawaii Gun Control Laws - FindLaw. (n.d.). Retrieved December 08, 2016, from http://statelaws.findlaw.com/hawaii-law/hawaii-gun-control-laws.html

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA v. HELLER. (n.d.). Retrieved December 08, 2016, from https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZS.html

Pappas, S. (2015, July 6). Guns Don't Deter Crime, Study Finds. Retrieved December 08, 2016, from http://www.livescience.com/51446-guns-do-not-deter-crime.html

Workplace Values

This week’s blog is to discuss the following: “...discuss how your organization portrays its values. Share any examples where behaviors were portrayed positively by your leaders or an instance where someone was unethical in your work environment.”



Normally I would link to a website that portrays my organization’s ethics statement. We have one! However, these blogs are published openly and while some may know for whom I work I prefer to keep my workplace somewhat private. That in and of itself can provide some insight into what values I see portrayed where I work. To be clear, I work for an organization that does amazing work and, quite literally changes lives and saves lives. However, they are very image conscious. One of the things I hope to teach my clients is that one does not stop representing an organization just because you are “off the clock.”

I do work in healthcare and healthcare has many ethical conundrums that crop up nearly every day. Do we let a patient die that voiced a desire to sign a “do not resuscitate” order but became unconscious before it was signed? Do we let a patient become homeless in order to gain them access to better medical care? Or even on a simpler level…in my line of work I am required to be available in blizzards and other types of inclement weather should a need arise to bring patients in from the elements. At what point should my boss order me out? What ethical obligations does my boss have to protect my safety balanced against the needs of the patients? It could be argued that I signed up for the job so my boss’ obligations should lean towards the patient (a stance with which I agree) but my boss still has to make a judgement call.

Recently the office was contaminated by bedbugs. For those that don’t know, bedbugs are a serious concern for medical facilities. And while my office is not the hospital many patients that are served at the hospital also utilize our services. Bedbugs reproduce rapidly, and they can be carried home by workers without knowing it. They are very pervasive if left unchecked. So it happened that a client brought bedbugs into our office. My boss had to make a choice over closing the office or risking the staff bringing infestations home with them. In the end my boss chose to close the office and incurred some displeasure from higher management. However, higher management was dragging their feet in giving an answer.

My boss made a decision on the side of safety for her workers. This is an ethical decision. It isn’t a great leap of philosophy to state that making a choice to keep people safe is ethical unless we are discussing a situation where others could be hurt through the act of making one person safe. Our particular work can be time-sensitive but largely isn’t. No patient safety was compromised by our office closing for a day (actually two as one day was when pest control was fumigating the building). However, the upper levels of management were upset that they were not the ones making the decision. Policy-wise only upper management can close a facility so they were correct in reminding my boss of that fact. However, she still had to make a timely call to protect her workers. Was upper-management being unethical in their delay?

I would argue no they were not but they may have forgotten a leadership concept. Workers become unsure of leadership when leadership cannot make a decision. Workers also do not always have access to the same information leadership can access. Nor are workers aware of the daily schedules of some leaders. In essence, they are working in a partial vacuum when situations arise that require some degree of timeliness. What is important to the workers who are attempting to plan their week or arrange childcare is that they have an answer on what direction to go. If this information is not forthcoming they begin to lose faith.



Ethical leadership is more than just trying to make ethical decisions. One can be an ethical leader and still be a bad leader. Good, ethical leadership seeks to understand under what conditions the people that look to you for guidance are laboring under. While this situation was relatively benign the lesson is that one must take a look at how you look from the other end of decision chain.