Ethics and Making Personal Decisions

Reflecting on this case made me recognize certain values I hold. I am much too family-oriented to wish to spend the largest percentage of my time away from my family. I would enjoy bringing pleasure to thousands of less significant others, but I would not be happy if I could only do so by losing valuable quality time with my family. Furthermore, I enjoy too many interests to wish to be limited to one primarily. Therefore, my ethical principle based on this value would be decisions that an individual makes must be based on whether or not they bring happiness to the individual, not based on whether or not they bring happiness to unrelated others. Subsumed within this principle is the tacit recognition that an individual is likely to be happier if the most significant others in his or her life are also happy.

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rface. This is why situations and deliberation are both a significant part of the process of making decisions involving ethics. Many times the best ethical decisions are made when seeing what is beneath the surface or between the lines than looking at what is on the surface or readily apparent. Thus it is quite possible that the highest principle that should guide ethical decisions is the value of personal happiness. When looked at in a rational manner, it seems like the decisions that most make the individual happy are those that are the most ethical. While poor decisions may appear to bring happiness, they may not because they were not properly thought out and what was chosen only seemed to promise happiness. For example, if I would have chosen to reject my familyÆs wishes and pursue a career in engineering I might have felt extremely happy if I only considered my happiness when deliberating the issue. Instead, I viewed the situation more in depth and saw a higher form of happiness I might have if I chose another decisions. By entering the business I could make many more people in my family secure and happy. This outweighed my own happiness. However, if I had not thought out the situation this deeply, I might have pur
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Approximate Word count = 4916
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)

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