Just as an athlete visualises how they are going to perform in a race, to prepare themselves for how they will respond when the starter pistol fires, imagining how you would respond to difficult and challenging ethical situations helps build your skills and capabilities for when you may face similar situations.
And whether you face that specific situation or something else, being able to reflect on what drives your choices, including the values that may be in play for you and the distinct perspectives you bring to these situations, helps you to step onto the field of ethics not as a spectator, but as a proactive and informed participant.
In what follows, you will be presented with an ethical scenario with a number of reflection prompts to help you better understand what is at stake for you in these types of decisions. How you respond will be played back to you to help provide some insight into the values you prioritise, the perspectives that you draw on and some of the biases that may be in play in your decision making.
Read the below scenario, and take a moment to consider how you would respond?
The way we see the world is shaped by our values. And they play a key role in how we respond to ethical challenges - whether we are aware of them or not. Values are those things we consider as what's good. They are qualities in life we strive for, like love, freedom, peace, excitement, family etc.
We will show you a number of values that may be in play for you in this situation. Arrange them in order according to which ones you value more highly in this situation.
As an individual you come to your decisions with a unique world view which influences how you are tackling ethical dilemmas. Using different perspectives provides an opportunity to consider dilemmas from different angles and could create additional options when you're stuck.
Which 1-2 of these perspectives did you consider when approaching the dilemma?
As humans we all have biases that influence how we make decisions. Many of these biases are cognitive tricks that help us make decisions quickly and with minimal effort. But in doing so, they create blind spots that stop us seeing important features of the decision. Do you feel any of the following biases could have influenced how you viewed the situation?
Reflecting on the values, perspectives and biases that are in play for you in this situation may provide some insight into how you approach decision making.
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Find out more: what is moral intuition?
These are the top three values you chose as most relevant to you in this situation.
Do you still feel these are the most relevant? Are there other values that might be in play for you that you hadn't considered? To learn more about how values affect decision-making, see our resources.
These are the perspectives you said were most relevant to your decision-making, when you considered this scenario.
To learn more about how perspectives affect decision-making, see our resources.
You identified the following biases as potentially relevant in how you respond to this situation.
Understanding and acknowledging our biases is a powerful way to approach scenarios more justly and fairly. If you would like to explore more biases, you can dig deeper here.