Ethical Approaches
Ethical Approaches
Ethical Approaches
) Consequentialist Theories:
Utilitarianism is one of the most common approaches to making ethical decisions, especially decisions with
consequences that concern large groups of people, in part because it instructs us to weigh the different amounts of
good and bad that will be produced by our action. This conforms to our feeling that some good and some bad will
necessarily be the result of our action and that the best action will be that which provides the most good or does the
least harm, or, to put it another way, produces the greatest balance of good over harm. Ethical environmental action,
then, is the one that produces the greatest good and does the least harm for all who are affected—government,
corporations, the community, and the environment.
Kant’s famous formula for discovering our ethical duty is known as the “categorical imperative.” It has a number of
different versions, but Kant believed they all amounted to the same imperative. The most basic form of the
imperative is: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a
universal law.” So, for example, lying is unethical because we could not universalize a maxim that said “One should
always lie.” Such a maxim would render all speech meaningless. We can, however, universalize the maxim, “Always
speak truthfully,” without running into a logical contradiction. (Notice the duty-based approach says nothing about
how easy or difficult it would be to carry out these maxims, only that it is our duty as rational creatures to do so.) In
acting according to a law that we have discovered to be rational according to our own universal reason, we are acting
autonomously (in a self-regulating fashion), and thus are bound by duty, a duty we have given ourselves as rational
creatures. We thus freely choose (we will) to bind ourselves to the moral law. For Kant, choosing to obey the
universal moral law is the very nature of acting ethically.