Summing Up
Our perceptions of whether we do "what's right" depend on such things as the situation, the time frame, the expectations of others, and whether we are face-to-face with the object of our actions. And we are much poorer judges of whether we are doing what's right than those observing us. In a nutshell, those are the feelings of many respondents to this month's column. Frances Pratt summed up the comments of others in three words, "ethics is subjective."
[This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.]
Ethics is to be judged by one's own conscience. If at the core we feel what we are doing is right or wrong, then we are most of the times right with that first top level intuition and that is the most ethical response to the situation. The rationalisation happens within us post this first subconscious intuition stage and that is where we as adults contaminate and corrupt our views on what is ethical or not. So if we train our ourselves to be obedient and listen and act as per the first stage response of the subconscious intuitive voice within us, we will always be ethical. While we have decoded this, it is difficult to practice in real life and that is why we have sometimes such blunders committed by us which in hindsight will be so silly and obvious that we would wonder as to how did we commit such an unethical act. We will need to transcend this boundary then we will have arrived and perfected the art of remaining ethical at all times.
on Jun 14, 2011