These are my reflections on Ethics classes for the past three weeks.
To start with, I should acknowledge that deep experience and commitment of my lecturers fascinates and motivates me.
As for classes, we have discussed the several definitions of ethics. Indeed, ethics are crucial aspect in decision making process as Prof. Evangelos Afendras mentioned. I also find it helpful to discuss such ethical issues by taking example from worldly events through reading latest newspaper and journal articles as we do during ethics classes. For example, I was given the task of examining an article about Banks giving lots of bonuses to its workers during financial crisis. With these kinds of ethical problem examples we started our journey to Introduction to Ethics classes.
Moreover, I gained number of new insights during the tutorial classes. Importantly, I better myself during the exercises through discussions on various topics. The latest topic of our discussion was “Killing or lying”. My personal opinion is dangers of lying exceed dangers of killing in general. However, my group mates also provided some meaningful opinions which I hardly disagree with. Overall, we decided to agree that dangers of killing and lying are conditional and it depends on the consequence or intention.
As my lecturer made it clear ethics is not just a matter of good and bad or right and wrong, but it is a sort of convention by which we base or moral judgments on looking at the degree of consequence. I have to say that I think the importance of consequence is the most essential thing I have learned so far. No doubt, every action taken by us has consequences. It is very good approach to judge actions by the result or expected result. A lot of us find ourselves in troubling situations, just because we might have the tendency to overlook the consequence of our deeds. I hope Introduction to Ethics classes will help students in covering loopholes in decision making skills.