Virtual Team Challenge: Spill!

Student Handout

Task Two: Ethics
What is Ethics?
Consider this: Again, you find yourself living in a cave in prehistoric times, collecting berries and bartering them for the other things you need. One day, a migrating prehistoric family settles in a nearby cave and decides that it, too, will collect berries. What's more, they brought with them an exciting new invention that has emerged farther along the mountain range where you live: the 'wheel'. You quickly find out that this new invention revolutionizes berry collection - and soon you find that your neighbors are collecting so many berries, it is becoming harder and harder for you to find your own. Furthermore, you are afraid of what over-picking berries may mean to the local wildlife. With less berries, the hunter will catch fewer and fewer animals, which means that there will be fewer sandals and baskets. Your neighbor's relentless pursuit of berries will spell disaster for everyone. So what do you do? What should you do? As humans started to organize into bigger and bigger communities, they needed ways to ensure that people treated each other, and their environment, in a certain way. They needed a way to let everyone know what 'right' and 'wrong' were in any number of situations. They formed mechanisms to ensure that people in society treated each other in a way everyone agreed was acceptable. People started to codify rules for how people are to treat one another into laws. But sometimes, laws aren't enough. For example, what if you have the opportunity to do something you know is wrong, but it's not against the law? Today, we have sets of guidelines and standards that help people know how to behave or act in certain situations. These guidelines and standards about how to behave in one's 'place of living' have evolved for thousands of years - and were given its current