A brief Introduction about how my ethics journey started

The first two weeks of the ethics classes were spent by introducing the lecturers as well as the topics. In addition to this, the importance of understanding ethical values was also focused on and how we as students can apply them to our practical lives. It is one of the aims of this prestigious university to produce graduates who are as stated in the university outline, passionate, caring, giving and global citizens. Consequently, this course was the ideal one which would help the university to achieve its mission. The lecturers reminded us the importance of shaping AIU students according to the mission of the university before they start the course. Of all the courses provided in the university, I consider ethics class as one of the classes which is really applicable to everyone’s life and it will have the most impact on my our lives. Throughout the trimester, I will observe my improvements and what I will benefit from the ethics team by writing reflections on each week. I would be more than euphoric to share with you my improvements as the time passes by through the website of our lecturer Mr. John Britto. Before I start writing my reflection, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to our respected lecturer who helped us to avail the website and share our ideas and feeling. It will help many of us to get the courage of sharing their views with more than one person (not only the lecturer), and this might be the start point for many to keep posting and sharing their knowledge and views to the others.

In spite of being familiar with the words related to ethics, I lacked deep knowledge of ethical values and most significantly I used to find hard when making ethical decisions. However, special thanks goes to my lecturer John Britto who introduced us the definition of ethics and ways of deciding ethical issues. To start with, ethics is the art and science of making moral judgments (what is wrong and right) which in return will have serious consequences on human welfare as well as the environment. In this class, I learnt that making ethical judgments need calmness and collecting all the facts necessary for the decision making. I looked back how I used to make decisions, and surprisingly I found out that I was not using the required logic to make the right decisions, for example sometimes my emotions used to influence my decisions. I benefited a lot from this class and I am sure I will make better decisions in the future. I will use one statement given us by our lecturer to test how far I have understood on making the right ethical decisions with the consideration of all aspects. The statement is “Lying is less harmful than killing” and I will examine it in the next few lines.

Undoubtedly, I do agree with above statement and there is no way when taking someone’s life is less harmful than lying. At first, looking from the bigger picture, both lying and killing are nasty actions in which most of the cultures and religions discourage, for example in ISLAM, prophet Mohamed(pbuh) said a Muslim person can steal, have an illegal intimacy or do any other forbidden thing, but he/she can never tell a lie. These words show how dangerous can be by telling a lie and if we interpret this hadith we can say that a person who tells a lie is not a Muslim anymore or in simpler words he is out of the Muslim boundary.  Lying can have very bad consequences and not only Islamic religion but also many other beliefs discourage it.  Nevertheless, lying is not that much harmful when it is compared to killing. In this context, killing means taking someone’s life and that means that person can never come back to life. But in the case of lying, a liar may repent and reverse his bad actions by telling the truth and avoid lies.  Lastly, I am not saying lying is acceptable, yet it is can be acceptable when compared to killing