Ethics Matter

Editor’s Preface

For most of the world, the “ethics” and what we mean by it is so much more elusive today. The Quantum age with its many crises and opportunities has posed several daunting ethical challenges to societies. Bridging the gap between ethics and decision-making has never been more difficult than today. To begin with, now what is ethical and not ethical seems to be much more complicated than it used to be. Therefore, sharpening our ability to detect ethical issues and improving our moral intelligence (moral IQ) are more essential than ever to navigate the complex moral landscape of the quantum age. In this context, the purpose of this book is, thus, to help us improve our moral IQ much the same way that children learn and understand about the world around them and present a set of resources to support a more moral society. First, we present some insightful and thought-provoking questions about ethics and then provide a little theory about the potential answers to those questions. And finally, there is a part explaining how we think or should think about ethical problems in the age of quantum. This book will help us better understand our ethical dilemmas and how to approach them. While it does not necessarily ensure us to make sound moral judgments, by making us more sensitive to moral matters this book aims to be a book of people who seek ethical counsel. By equipping us with an understanding of ethics and ethical principles, this book may cultivate a sense of moral awareness and develop skills needed to navigate ethical dilemmas and make ethically informed decisions in various contexts.

Now, more than ever we need higher ethical standards in every part of our lives. The proliferation of advanced technologies, the widening gap between those who have access to them and those who do not, and the rapidly evolving environment present us with a host of novel ethical dilemmas that often defy traditional solutions or “common wisdom.” As technology advances, it introduces complex ethical issues that may not have clear precedents or established ethical frameworks. These challenges require us to adapt our ethical thinking and approaches to address emerging concerns effectively. There are many new important ethical issues that need to be re-considered. This re-raises the basic questions about ethics that philosophers have been trying to find answers to for centuries: “What principles drive our choices?”, “What are we willing to do to ensure that ethical decisions are achieved?” and “What do we value ethics for?” Ethics from many aspects in our lives are still obscure. More and more people (teachers, students, employees, employers, and customers) are complaining that our generation and society suffers from immorality and amorality. To address more effectively the ethical implications of the new situations, ethics is gaining greater relevance in educational institutions and workplaces. To navigate more effectively in today’s elusive ethical standards, we all need to understand what we and other people might think about what constitutes what is ethical or not.

The purpose of this book is to help (1) people re-imagine ethical issues and dilemmas with the new value propositions of quantum paradigm; (2) develop a new ethical contract for people and institutions (3) people challenge themselves to consistently learn, grow and advance more ethically to pursue a more meaningful and purposeful life; (4) leaders support common-sense ethical policy that invests in new ethical propositions of quantum paradigm. In this context, our book is thought to be important for practitioners, leaders, teachers, parents, employers, and for people who need some ethical guidance in order to navigate the harsh realities of ethical dilemmas presented by the Quantum world. In the light of the current and foreseen ethical dilemmas of the future, this book tries to relate traditional ethical paradigm and practice with the Quantum paradigm.

Introduction

This book consists of four parts and eleven chapters regarding the field of ethics. Each part covers one of the main branches of ethics:

Part I, including three chapters, dedicated to behavioral ethics (why people act as they do) and explain factors that might and does influence ethical decision-making and behavior by the tools of behavioral psychology, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. Thus, Part I focuses on descriptive (or comparative) ethics aiming to describe, compare and explore how people do think and behave about moral issues. The first chapter (Chapter 1) aims to provide some invaluable insights by describing and comparing people’s moral beliefs, claims and behaviors in different cultures. The second chapter (Chapter 2), on the other hand, aims to explore the cognitive processes, emotions, psychological and sociological factors that influence moral decision-making. The third chapter (Chapter 3), on the other hand, attempts to understand ethical sensemaking by exploring various ethical decision-making models.

Part II, including three chapters, is dedicated to normative (or prescriptive) ethics attempting to discover which actions are in fact right or wrong. This part aims to seek answers to questions studied primarily by philosophy and theology such as “What should people do?”, “What should they think?”, “How should one act?”, “What should the laws and norms be?” and “What is right and wrong?” It also attempts to discover “which action are in fact right or wrong”, “which things are in fact good or bad”, and “what it takes to be a good or bad person?” Since there is no straight-forward answers to these questions, and the answers depends on the approach chosen, each chapter focuses on different approaches. The first chapter (Chapter 4) is dedicated to virtue ethics and addresses questions such as “How should I live?”, “What is good life?”, “What kind of a life I want to pursue in life”, “What are proper family and social values?”, and “What kind of a person I want to be?”. The second chapter (Chapter 5), on the other hand, focuses on deontological ethics (non-consequentialist ethics) which attempt to determine the right action in terms of a duty or set of duties or some intrinsic drive, motivation, intent of actions/or agents. The third chapter (Chapter 6) focuses on the teleological ethics (Consequentialist ethics) which suggests that the moral value of an action is determined by the goodness or desirability of its consequences. All these chapters present some insightful and thought-provoking ideas and more importantly prompt us to ask more questions.

Part III, including two chapters, provides a little theory about meta-ethics -a branch of moral philosophy that focuses on understanding the nature of moral language, moral knowledge, and moral truth and attempts to achieve a conceptual clarification when addressing questions such as “What’s goodness?”, “What does ‘power’, ‘beauty’, and ‘money’ represent to me?”, “How can we tell what is good from what is bad?”, and “How are moral propositions defended?” The chapters in this part focus on the origins of ethical principles and attempt to answer the questions studied primarily by philosophers such as “Whether moral values are eternal truths or simple human conventions” and “Whether moral judgements are universal or relative, of one kind or of many kinds”. The first chapter of Part III (Chapter 7) focuses on non-cognitivism which is a philosophical position within metaethics that denies the cognitive status of moral judgments by proposing that moral statements are not propositions with truth values and not capable of being true or false as they are merely capable of expressing emotions, attitudes, or preferences. The second chapter (Chapter 8), on the other hand, focuses on cognitivism which is a philosophical position within metaethics that asserts the cognitive status of moral judgments and propose that moral statements express propositions that are capable of being true or false.

Lastly, Part IV, including three chapters, focuses on applied ethics. The first chapter (Chapter 9) offers a practical and widely used framework for ethical decision-making in various professional contexts (Principlism). The second chapter (Chapter 10) attempts to identify the correct course of action for real problems by case-based reasoning. Finally, the third chapter (Chapter 11) attempts to illustrate the role of a code of ethics in any industry, profession, or organization focusing on some selected professions.