5/18/2015

ELI Ethical Lens Inventory

Rights - Responsibility and Results
JENNIFER ROBINSON

You balance your reasoning skills (rationality) and your intuition (sensibility) to determine how to fulfill your duties while achieving the greatest good for each individual (autonomy).
Core: Autonomy and Rationality/Sensibility
You prioritize the value of autonomy over equality. Your primary concern is protecting individual rights. You believe this is the best way to assure that everyone in the community is treated fairly. You value rationality and sensibility equally. You believe that while there are universal principles, each situation is unique and not all exceptions can be categorized. For you the best solution is both consistent and flexible.
Classical: Temperance and Prudence
You value individual balance and restraint in the desire for pleasure as you seek to satisfy your duties. You also demonstrate wisdom in practical matters and foresight as you act with enlightened self-interest in a particular situation. You also bring optimism, imagination and the gift of entrepreneurship to the table.
Key: “I make responsible choices that are good for everyone.”
Because you equally value rationality and sensibility, along with autonomy, you tend to assume that each person operates from a clear sense of their own values, as you do.
Behavior: Fulfilling duties while creating the greatest good
You define an ethical person as one who fulfills their duties and does the right thing as an autonomous, fully-responsible adult. By doing this, the ethical person, in your opinion, is able to make responsible choices that benefit many different individuals at the same time.
Tools: Reason and Experience
You tend to think through a problem carefully and research options to find the one that will allow you to fulfill your duties. At the same time, you see the current situation in light of past experiences and temper reason with intuition and imagination to incorporate new information and solve problems.
You can tolerate ambiguity within the context of clear, broad principles.
Gift: Self-Knowledge and Free will
Your gift to the community is balancing responsibility with entrepreneurship. Because you strongly value autonomy, you are also fiercely self-reliant and accountable - and expect the same of others. You temper doing your duty with noticing what is required for you and others to be happy, and thus avoid both rigidly following your duty and seeking the next fleeting dream.
Blind: Belief that motive justifies method or your own good is good enough
Sometimes you fail to be accountable to those who are depending on you when you exercise your free will. So long as you've satisfied your own needs, you can become complacent, leaving problems unresolved in the long-term and everyone else to fend for themselves. You may also unintentionally cause people upset and pain because you are so focused on your good motive, that you don't see the problems with your method.
Risk: Being autocratic or reducing decisions to cost-benefit analysis
Without self-knowledge, you run the risk of becoming autocratic, of requiring everyone to do things your way in order to measure up ethically. You tend not to consider other interpretations of the facts or listen to other approaches once you have made up your mind. In addition, if you do not assure that all have free will, you run the risk of reducing decisions to a narrow and purely financial cost-benefit analysis. You will tend to cut corners if you become attached to achieving your own goals.
Temptation: Excuses and expedience
If you are not paying attention, you can be tempted to either excuse yourself from following the rules or to base your actions on what is politic or advantageous rather than on what it right or just. You'll convince yourself that the rules were meant for other people or that the action you want to take really does meet your responsibilities - even though your "Responsible Self" tells you otherwise. Or you will convince yourself that everyone will be happy in the end and not mind a few insignificant corners being cut.
Vice: Becoming judgmental or greedy
Without self-knowledge, you can become overly rigid in your expectations, leading to legalism as you obsess over minute details. You will also become judgmental and when others do not fulfill (what you believe are) their duties, you will be quick to label them as unethical. On the other hand, if you fail to exercise free will responsibly, your healthy pursuit of good for all can devolve into an excuse for taking as much for yourself as you can get away with. Crisis: : Failure or becoming exhausted
Unless you develop the practice of mindfulness and reflection, at some point you will face failure or exhaustion. No one can accomplish or acquire everything and the more you do, the less satisfying it becomes. In addition, no one can meet all of the obligations that your "Responsible Self" has on

your to-do list. If you have few friends, it could be because you are so judgmental or so acquisitive that you drive everyone away.
Seeing: Consider the Community
To see more clearly, make sure that your actions are good for the community as a whole and not just for individual members of the community.
Although you do a god job of making sure your head and your heart agree, you do tend to over-focus on the needs of individuals. As you consider what your duty is and what will provide the greatest good for individual stakeholders, remember that others may see the situation differently or need different supports to fulfill their duties. Remember also to temper your actions with consideration of the needs of the whole community. Sometimes an individual actually benefits by restraining autonomy for the good of the community. As you learn to consider the perspectives of others in your decision making process, you will live out the best of your ideals with compassion and care for others.