Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Criticism
Moral Reasoning
The reasoning process by which human
behaviors, institutions, or policies are
judged to be in accordance with or in
violation of moral standards.
Moral reasoning always involves:
An understanding of what reasonable moral
standards require, prohibit, value, or condemn;
and
Evidence or information that shows that a
particular person, policy, institution or
behavior has the kind of features that these
moral standard requires, prohibit, value, or
condemn .
Moral Reasoning
Moral Reasoning
In many cases one or more of the three components involved are not
expressed.
Failure to make ones moral standard explicit leaves one vulnerable to all
the problems created by basing critical decision on unexamined
assumptions.
The assumptions may be inconsistent, may have no rational basis, and
may lead the decision maker into unwittingly make decisions with
undesirable consequences.
To uncover the implicit moral standard one has to retrace the persons
moral reasoning back to its bases.
What factual information does the person accepts as evidence for this moral
judgment, and
What moral standards are needed to relate this factual information (logically) to the
moral judgment.
Moral Responsibility
Three Components of Moral Responsibility
Person caused or helped cause the injury, or failed to
prevent it when he or she could and should have
(causality).
Omissions; power to prevent the injuries, and should have done
so.
For some reason the person has an obligation to prevent such
injury (special relationship)
Uncertainty
Difficulty
Seriousness
Corporate Responsibility
Subordinates Responsibility
When a subordinate acts on the orders of a
legitimate superior, the subordinate is
absolved of all the responsibility for that act:
only the superior is morally responsible for the
wrongful act even though the subordinate was
the agent who carried it out.
There are limits to an employees obligation to
obey an order to do what is immoral. Superior
can put significant economic pressure on an
employee and such pressure can mitigate the
employees responsibility, but they do not
totally eliminate it.