Using Your Ethics Toolkit to Create Better Choices

Intuition can be a good guide for decision-making when the current situation generally matches the situations in which the intuition was formed. But for novel or ambiguous situations, relying only on intuition can blind us to possible negative consequences by focusing our attention only on data that support our intuition. To reduce the likelihood of these errors and to better imagine and prepare for the outcomes of our choices, we use various tools from ethics, such as thinking about principles, character, consequences, and relationships; considering stakeholders; making better arguments; and tests for avoiding rationalizations. The objective of this note is to outline the process of applying these tools to help you exercise your moral judgment.