Essay on Morality
- How do you make moral decisions? What resources inform you, personal, professional, etc.?
Moral decision is a rational procedure of moral consciousness that makes the choice of action giving preferences to certain moral values. Main steps in making moral decisions are analysis of moral situation, definition of the problem, comparison of options, assessment of consequences, and making the decision.
Correctness of the decision depends on the individual’s knowledge of the issue, which, in turn, relies on personal moral experience and moral culture. Moral decision-making involves such mechanisms of ethical consciousness as sense, reason, and intuition. While sense successfully functions in solving relatively simple moral problems (with common, patterned acts), it gives way to reason that makes creative moral decisions. Thus, moral experience guides a person in situations where circumstances are beyond the stereotypical thinking. In a situation that does not provide sufficient information for decision-making and at the same time requires a quick choice of an option, moral intuition comes into action. Accumulating moral experience of a person, intuition in a way replaces the missing opportunity to assess all the pros and cons for each of the options for action (Holmes, 2007). All three mechanisms complement each other, and only the adequacy of one of them to a specific situation allows making a moral decision.
Dynamic pace of modern life along with scientific and technological revolution and its affect on society increase the individual’s responsibility for moral decisions. Therefore, there is a strong need to create a harmonic moral world of an individual, whose rational decisions should be done not at the expense of one’s emotional richness, and achieved in unity with the development of the culture of the feelings.
- Discuss the moral dilemma from the short film on food (Food, Inc). What solutions would you recommend?
The film in question is an unflattering overlook of the US food industry and corporations that control it. The author investigates the industrial production of meat, grains and vegetables, showing viewers how inhumane and environmentally unfriendly this process is now. The law allows corporations to deliver to consumer’s table cheap but dangerous food.
Any corporation, if it was a real person, would be unsociable, intractable, authoritarian, and not prone to long-term relationships. The courts and the government consider a corporation as a community of shareholders, as a business owner, but the corporation itself has no moral barriers and liabilities (Weber, 2009).
On the one hand, the demonstrated technology would be useful in the case of a cataclysm, when humanity would not be able to grow food in a natural way. But currently it is not the case and there is no justified need for such food! On the other hand, when corporations, whose aim is cheap production and maximal profits, take over the production of food, that is when these technologies come at hand. In the second half of the twentieth century, we discovered an amazing opportunity to produce cheap chemicals: fertilizers, chlorine, and pesticides to kill insects. It seemed that all of this would improve our lives. But what we see now? Cancer epidemic which we cannot stop (Weber, 2009).
The film presents a standard and one of the most important moral dilemmas of modern society – the choice between public good and private gain. Of course, one could say that there is an easy way out – to follow one’s moral principles and collectively decide to refuse from substance and technology dangerous for the environment and human. However, in such dense networks that depend on the decisions of many people, relying on the moral qualities of each of them is a utopia. Yet, one of the possible effective solutions could be tougher legislation in this area, and reduction of the influence of corporations on government.
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