Ethical Approaches

Four Ethical Approaches
Four Ethical Approaches- By Buie Seawell, Daniels College of Business,
University of Denver
There are many ways to define "ethics," almost as many as there are ethicists. For our purposes, let's use this definition:
Ethics is the discipline and practice of applying value to human behavior
(as well as to the constructs of human culture particularly to morality, customs and laws) resulting in meaningfulness.
From the earliest moments of recorded human consciousness, the ethical discipline has exhibited four fundamental "approaches" These four approaches are often called "ethical decision-making frameworks:" Utilitarian Ethics (outcome based), Deontological Ethics (duty based), Virtue Ethics (virtue based) and
Communitarian Ethics (community based). Each has a distinctive point of departure as well as distinctive ways of doing the fundamental ethical task of raising and answering questions of value. It is also important to understand that all four approaches have both overlaps and common elements.
Some of the "common elements" of all four approaches are the following:
· Impartiality: weighting interests equally
· Rationality: backed by reasons a rational person would accept
· Consistency: standards applied similarly to similar cases
· Reversibility: standards that apply no matter who "makes" the rules
These are, in a sense, the rules of the "ethics game", no matter which school or approach to ethics one feels the closest identity.
The Utilitarian approach is perhaps the most familiar and easiest to understand of all the four approaches to ethics. Whether we think about it or not, most of us are doing utilitarian ethics a much of the time, especially those of us in business. The
Utilitarians asks a very important question: "How will my actions affect others?"
And they go on to attempt to "quantify"