Glossary
A list of key terms that commonly arise in discourse about ethics
Interests (and Conflicts of Interest)
People, other living things, and certain other entities (such as corporations or governments) have interests in securing, obtaining, or enjoying that which is good or good for them; they have interests in securing, obtaining, or enjoying that which it is rational for them to want or contributes to their thriving. People’s interests may or may not coincide with their preferences, and some may not know what is in their own interest. Nonetheless, discussion of interests in professional ethics primarily concerns those interests that people or entities commonly recognize and seek to further.
The notion of a “conflict of interest” applies to a more specific situation than simply one of conflicting interests. For example, an engineering student may have several interests competing for her time, such as an interest in learning engineering and doing well in her courses, an interest in developing her college friendships, and an interest in getting exercise. These are conflicting interests, but it is not a conflict “of” interest. In ethics, We may say that a person (or perhaps some other party, such as a consulting firm) has a conflict of interest or is in a conflict of interest position when that party:
- Is in a position of trust that requires the exercise of judgment on behalf of others (people, institutions, etc)
- Has interests, obligations/responsibilities, or commitments of the sort that might interfere with the exercise of such judgment, and having those interests is neither obvious nor usual for those in this position of trust
Parties with conflicts of interest are not neces- sarily guilty of any wrongdoing. The moral question is how they handle the conflict of interest; do they act in a way that makes them deserving of the trust placed in them? The most common ways of handling a conflict of interest are either to recuse oneself from the position of trust, divest oneself of the potentially competing interests, or, if the conflict is one that people can usually be trusted to manage, to openly acknowledge those other interests and obligations. Openly acknowledging conflicts of interest gives others the opportunity to decide if they think the judgment of the person with the conflict can nonetheless be trusted.
Justice
Justice concerns the degree to which a society contains and supports the institutional conditions necessary for the realization of two general values:
- developing and exercising one’s capacities and expressing one’s experience
- participating in determining one’s action and the conditions of one’s action
Obligations
An ethical duty or obligation is a moral requirement to follow a certain course of action, that is, to do or refrain from doing certain things. It may arise from making a promise or an agreement or from entering a profession. For example, according to many engineering codes of ethics, engineers not only have a moral right to raise issues of wrongdoing outside their organizations, but, additionally, they have an obligation to do so when public health and safety are at stake.
Moral obligations and moral rules are interdefinable, that is, if you have a moral rule, there exists a corresponding statement of obligation and vice versa.
Obligations and rules may be institutional or legal rather than moral. For example, at many colleges there is an institutional rule obliging all students to see their advisors on or before Reg- istration Day. Some workplaces have rules about where various categories of employee may park or how employees earn the right to park in certain desirable locations. Certain institutional rules, such as the designation of the parking spaces reserved for emergency vehicles, may have an ethical as well as institutional basis, but institutional rules need not have ethical significance. Legal and institutional rules share the logic of moral rules, so legal obligations and legal rules are interdefinable in the same way as moral obligations and moral rules. Moral obligations and most moral rules specify what acts one is morally forbidden, or morally required, to perform (without consideration of the conse- quences of the action – except in so far as these consequences are part of the characterization of an act itself; killing, for example, is an act that results in death).
Opinions
Preferences
Statements of preference are not judgments about whether something is good or bad, but are expressions of someone’s likes, dislikes, or habitual attitudes. For example:
“I like fried peppers.” “John likes them, too.”
“I am unalterably opposed to having cats in the neighborhood.”
Unlike a value judgment, such as “fried peppers make a good side dish”, a statement of preference, such as “I like fried peppers,” is an assertion about the speaker’s likes rather than about the characteristics of fried peppers.
Statements of preference are false only if they misrepresent the subject’s feelings, views, or attitudes. They are subjective in the straightforward sense that their truth-value depends only on characteristics of the subject whose preferences are under discussion and not on characteristics of the object that the subject does or does not prefer.
The speaker need not give any reasons for a preference. For some matters, such as preferring one flavor of ice cream to another, people usually do not have reasons for their preference. When you state your preference, you are stating your attitudes or feelings, not giving a reasoned judgment. A person may have a strong preference for something while believing neither that it fulfills some criteria or standards for goodness of that kind of thing, nor that it will bring about some good.
Rights
A right is a justified claim or assertion of what a rights-holder is due. For example, many engineering societies recognize an engineer’s moral right to protest. The matters that engineers have a right to protest and bring to light are generally serious defects and wrongdoing, such as poor quality or financial fraud. Saying that they have a moral right to do this means that if they bring such matters to light, they are at least prima facie morally justified in doing so. (The right would be only prima facie, because there might be special circumstances in which publicly disclosing some defect would obviously make it possible for a terrorist to cause massive destruction by exploiting that defect, in which special circumstances disclosing the defect would be both unwise and unjustified.) Suppose the engineer has some affiliation with the organization that would suffer from disclosure of the defect or wrongdoing (such as being an employee of that organization) and the engineer had good reason to think that the company did not already know of the defect. In that case, loyalty to the organization would prima facie oblige the engineer to bring the information or protest to responsible persons in the organization to give the organization a chance to remedy the situation, before “going public” with the information or protest. What does the right of engineers to protest a matter imply about the obligations of others? It means that others ought not to try to prevent the engineer from doing so. It also means that, as a moral matter, no one should retaliate against an engineer who does so.
The bases or justifications for moral/ethical rights are ethical, the bases or justifications for legal rights are legal, and those for official or institutional rights derive from the definitions of the offices or institutions in question. The same right might be simultaneously a moral/ethical right, a legal right, and an institutional right, but one sort of right need not be another sort, because only one sort of justification might exist for it.
Value Judgements
A value judgment is any judgment that can be expressed in the form “X is good/superior/ meritorious/worthy/desirable” or “X is bad/inferior/without merit/worthless/ undesirable,” at least in some respects. For example:
“Fried peppers make a good side dish”
“This knife is bad for cutting cucumbers”
Any judgment, including any value judgment, that is to stand up to critical evaluation must be based on relevant criteria, that is, there must be good reasons for making that judgment. In the case of a knife, relevant criteria would be having a sharp blade, being well balanced, and having a comfortable grip. Being bright blue would not be a relevant criterion for being a good knife per se even if under some special circumstances one might want one’s knife to be bright blue.
Saying that value judgments are objective in the sense that they are based on relevant reasons and evidence does not guarantee that everyone, or even every reasonable person, will agree on a particular judgment. If one offers the judgment that fried peppers make a good side dish, one would be expected to back it up with reasons, such as characteristics of the flavor, texture, nutritional, or other properties of fried peppers that make them complement other foods. One could question whether fried peppers fulfilled the criteria mentioned or even whether such criteria were relevant. If it were asserted, for example, that peppers make a good side dish because they are colorful, the hearer might dispute whether color is a relevant characteristic of side dishes.
Controversies and disagreements do not show that the judgments are subjective, in the sense of depending only on the party engaged in the controversy who holds a certain view, because disagreements are about the topic in question, not about the people who make the disputed judgments.
When we consider value judgments, the first point to consider is the difference between being desirable or worthy in some respect, and simply being desired, liked, or preferred by some person or group.
References
Whitbeck, Caroline. 2011. Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.