Ethical Decision Making: Right vs. Right
By Mary Hunter on February 7, 2012 in Teaching People

I mentioned in my back to school post a couple of weeks ago that I am taking an ethics class this semester. This class is one of the required classes for my behavior analysis master’s program. The class has been pretty interesting so far and each class has been filled with plenty of good discussions and debate.

Recently we read a book chapter by Rushworth Kidder called “The Ethics of Right versus Right.” (If you’re interested, the full chapter is actually available for free from the Institute for Global Ethics, although you do have to sign up to get access to it.)

Tough choices and ethical dilemmas are often very hard to make. What makes these decisions hard, according to Kidder, is that they are often choices of “right” vs. “right.” Both possibilities have value and merit, yet one must be picked over the other. (Now, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t still right vs. wrong choices. These just aren’t ethical decisions.)

The most interesting part of this chapter was that Kidder names four basic paradigms that encompass most of these ethical dilemmas, the right vs. right choices. Ethical choices often involve decisions between:

Individual versus community Truth versus loyalty Short term versus long term Justice versus mercy

These four basic paradigms can be useful for analyzing ethical choices and realizing what has created the conflict. If you have a better understanding of a choice, then you should be better prepared to solve it.

Ethical questions arise all the time in both animal training and in animal rescue work. I’ve been thinking recently of some of the ethical questions I’ve run into and how they fit into these four paradigms. For instance, many decisions in animal rescue work deal with how to allocate scarce resources. Many