Being Your Best Self, Part 1: Moral Awareness
Moral awareness is the ability to detect and appreciate the ethical aspects of a decision that one must make.
Discussion Questions
1. Who should be primarily responsible for keeping ethical considerations in your frame of reference as you make decisions in the workplace or at school?Your boss / teacher?Or you? Why?
2. Think about the last time that your gut told you not to do something. Was it right or wrong?
3. For one of the people in the video, relying on her gut failed her in matters of personal relationships. For another, relying on his gut helped him reach the right solution regarding the identity of a car bomber. What lessons can we draw from these two experiences?
4. Has the desire, articulated by one of the speakers in the video, to trade future pain for present happiness ever caused YOU to do something unwise?Something immoral?
Being Your Best Self, Part 2: Moral Decision Making
Moral decision making is the ability to produce a reasonable and defensible answer to an ethical question.
Discussion Questions
1. This video talks about how the self-serving bias can make it difficult for people facing a decision with ethical dimensions to make the right choice when their interests are involved. What other factors that are illustrated in Ethics Unwrapped videos can make it difficult for a well-meaning person to make the right choice?
2. When you do use the cognitive processes in your brain to try to resolve ethical dilemmas, are you a deontologist who focuses more on rules or a consequentialist who focuses more on outcomes? Or are you both?How do you decide which approach is decisive in any particular setting?
3. Tilly is a pathologist.Late one night she was alone in the lab performing an autopsy.She was extremely hungry, but wanted to finish her work before she left for the evening.She notices some strips of flesh left from an earlier autopsy.She cooked the flesh on a Bunsen burner and ate it, then finished her work. Did Tilly act immorally?Why or why not?
4. Is it right to pay a bribe to induce a government entity to approve a program that will benefit people?How would you decide? How would you ensure that your self-interest was not unduly affecting your decision?
Being Your Best Self, Part 3: Moral Intent
Moral intent is the desire to act ethically when facing a decision and overcome the rationalization to not be ethical “this time.”
Discussion Questions
1. Do you want to be the sort of person who does the right thing? Why or why not?
2. Think about a recent scandal where a business person or politician or sports figure did something unethical. Then imagine what rationalizations that person might have used to give himself or herself permission to act immorally.
3. Have you ever done something that you know in retrospect that you shouldn’t have but you did it because you wanted to help out a friend, a family member, or an organization you belonged to?
Being Your Best Self, Part 4: Moral Action
Moral action involves taking the necessary steps to transform the intent to do the right thing into reality. This includes moral ownership, moral efficacy, and moral courage.
Discussion Questions
1. Can you think of a situation where it was difficult to do the right thing, but you managed to do it? What factors were present that enabled you to live up to your values?
2. What do you think of the “liked versus respected” dichotomy suggested by one of the people interviewed for the video?
3. Which of the Ethics Unwrappedvideos resonated most strongly with you?