Complexities in Ethical Decision-Making
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Complexities in Ethical Decision-Making Libby V. Morris 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
The wave of scandals across education, corporate, and governmental sectors over the past few years drives home the need for greater attention to ethical decision-making and ethical behavior. Ann E. Tenbrunsel, the Rex and Alice A. Martin Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Notre Dame, clearly made this point as the signature guest lecturer during the University of Georgia’s 2018 Ethics Week. Okay, you are probably laughing now….a week for ethics! Please note that this week is our intentional focus on ethics, not the sole week we have set aside to Bbe ethical.^ Professor Tenbrunsel began by stating that we, like other people, are generally not as ethical as we think we are. Some shifting in the seats occurred as this point because most academics and students like to think of themselves as principled and dedicated to high standards of conduct. Yet, through multiple examples, we were led to see that a gap exists between who we think we are, who we would like to be, and who we actually are. Her research into behavioral ethics investigates the effects of ethical boundaries and ethical awareness on decision-making. Our blind spots do not allow us to see our behaviors or decisions as having ethical components. For example, according to Professor Tenbrunsel, if we are asked to predict a behavior, we think abstractly and big picture; and we tend to project acting in highly ethical, desirable ways. Yet, at the time of a decision, we tend to think concretely with specificity; and we bring other frameworks into play. Thus, the ethical dimensions of a decision may fade as other issues (e.g., profitability, winning, pleasing a superior) ascend. BBounded awareness^ allows us to exclude relevant information when we define a problem and thus limits the full examination of ethical dimensions. It was informative to learn that we easily make prediction errors about how we will behave in the prediction-action-recollection phases of decision-making and that subsequently we may participate in revisionary retrospectives on our actions. Context, other criteria, and decision frames allow us to compartmentalize our decisions. And, we may even recast our less than optimal decisions with softening euphemisms, such as Bwe are just greasing the wheels^ as opposed to Btipping the scales.^ My take-away was that Bgood^ people often make poor decisions and may engage unintentionally in unethical behaviors as a result of bounded awareness, ethical fading, and
* Libby V. Morris [email protected]
1
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
Innovative Higher Education
poorly designed organizational systems that compromise ethical behavior. In Blind Spots: Why we fail to do what’s right and what to do about it (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011), Tenbrunsel and co-author Max H. Bazerman shared their research on bounded ethicality and the emerging field of behavioral ethics, that is, what do people actually do when facing ethical dilemmas. Ethical lapses and u
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