- What are ethical judgments?
- Characteristics of ethical judgments
- Examples of ethical judgments
- Relationship with moral judgments
We explain what ethical judgments are, their characteristics and various examples. In addition, its relationship with moral judgments.
What are ethical judgments?
Ethical judgments are mental acts that allow us to judge our actions, behaviors or procedures with regard to the set of existing alternatives and the system of moral values to which we adhere as part of a society. Our capacity for ethical judgment determines the morally correct way to act or to resolve a dilemma, which is why it is an important part of the decision making.
Any type of action, topic or context is susceptible to ethical judgments. In this sense, with them we can find the most morally suitable alternatives and discard those that, on the contrary, are reprehensible.
To distinguish between the two, we must go to the codes, rules Y laws that our society proposes to govern these matters, or to the codes deontological that defend and supervise professional fees, for example. In any case, it is a reasoned decision.
Characteristics of ethical judgments
Ethical judgments are characterized by the following:
- They depend on a specific context and the social norms that are involved in it.
- Reason intervenes in them. thought aware.
- Evaluates alternatives to behavior and ways in which a dilemma can be resolved, rather than simply focusing on whether something is right or wrong, good or bad.
Examples of ethical judgments
Examples of the application of ethical judgments are situations such as the following:
- The wife of a university professor decides to pursue the career in which she teaches and enrolls precisely her subject. The professor, after much thought, decides that there is a conflict of interest and that he cannot objectively evaluate his wife. Therefore, he must choose between asking his wife to enroll the subject with another professor, or to withdraw the subject that semester and enroll it when he no longer teaches it.
- An international criminal is captured decades after committing the crime, when it comes to an old and sickly man. International justice must, then, decide what is the ethical way to proceed to impart Justice: sentence him to an ordinary prison, sentence him to home jail, or sentence him to community service.
- In the midst of a pandemic, in which hospitals are overcrowded, a resident doctor is on call when five patients decompensate and require admission to the ICU. However, there is capacity for only three of them. The doctor decides that the criteria for selecting who goes to the ICU and who does not will be the probability of survival. But based on what? The age of the patient? The existence or non-existence of comorbidity factors?
Relationship with moral judgments
The moral judgments they are distinguished from ethical ones in that the former consist of mental evaluations of right and wrong, that is, good and bad. That is, moral judgments aspire to a truth, denying or affirming the moral value of a behavior or a decision, and therefore are handled in absolute terms.
On the other hand, an ethical judgment is always circumscribed in a set of options or decisions to be made, and therefore it is handled in applied terms, that is, more pragmatic, less universal.
Let's look at an example to understand this difference.Suppose a company decides to test a new flu drug on a group of volunteers, without warning them about side effects. A moral judgment on the matter would simply condemn the action as immoral or “bad”, for endangering the volunteers and preventing them from making a conscious and informed decision.
In contrast, an ethical judgment is one that would seek the appropriate way to resolve the situation in a moral way, that is, one that would propose moral alternatives to such behavior, such as informing patients beforehand or testing the drug on animals first.