On Ethics Alarms, as with its progenitor, The Ethics Scoreboard, commenters frequently accuse me of manipulating ethical arguments to endorse or support a political agenda. I often find such comments unfair, intellectually lazy and wrong, but please, keep making them. Avoiding a political or ideological slant is one of the most challenging tasks in rendering ethical analysis, and it is so easy (and tempting) to fall into the trap of letting bias rule reason that it helps to be regularly smacked upside the head.

Even with repeated smacks, true objectivity is nearly impossible in ethics, because of the central role played by ethical conflicts—not the ethical problem of conflicts of interest, but the philosophical problem of designating priorities among competing ethical values. Ethical conflicts require choosing which ethical value yields to another: a doctor knows a patient is dying and that nothing can be done. Is the ethical course to be honest, or to be kind? In public policy, ethical conflicts abound, and often involve deciding between two different versions of the same ethical value. Which version of “fair” is fairer, for example: allowing a talented, hard-working individual to keep the money she earns for her and her family, or for her to have to share some of that money with others, perhaps less talented and hard working, but also perhaps less fortunate, who do not have enough to survive? Ethical problems pit compassion against accountability, responsibility against forgiveness, autonomy against fairness, equity against justice. Continue reading →