‘Morale’ is a strange word. It is often misplaced. A victim of people who throw it in at any time. You will be looked at strangely if you just use the word in your daily life: ‘Wow, that was a moral shower!’ You already know instinctively that some things are morally irrelevant. Morally relevant issues often cause people to fight each other out. How do you solve that? When you ask those questions, you enter the field of ethics.
What is ethics?
Ethics is the science that considers whether something is morally relevant and, if so, whether it is morally right or wrong. But ethics does not answer these questions through prehistoric sentiments, but through strong reasoning. Immanuel Kant summarized the entire philosophy into three core questions: what can I know? (epistemology, philosophy of science), what can I hope? (philosophy of religion) and finally: what should I do? He assigned the latter question to ethics.
The answer to that question is not that simple. A pastor naturally gives a very different answer than a shaman. But even within ethics, where it is not about philosophy of life but about argumentation, philosophers and ethicists are far from agreeing with each other. There are various ethical theories. For example, utilitarianism, in which the golden rule is: what gives as much happiness or well-being as possible to as many people as possible is right. Duty ethics are the opposite of this. The consequences of actions are not interesting to a duty ethicist. It’s about the action itself. There are certain universal duties on which we can best agree. We simply have to adhere to those standards. As people, we have to do our duties, whether it suits us or not, or whether the situation lends itself to it or not. In addition, virtue ethicists own some ethical ground. These ethics will be discussed later.
Building bridges
Apparently the answer to the question is: what should I do? not so obvious. You are therefore on dangerous ground when you try to define what exactly constitutes ethically responsible action. Perhaps ethical action is therefore nothing more than a way of acting in such a way that you can justify your choice with ethical arguments. The definition is nice and vague because an all-encompassing definition would be a death blow to ethics, which was created precisely to find out how we can act ethically. Moreover, there is no need to develop religious thoughts about ethics. It is a science that should not claim that it has a monopoly on the truth. It must be imbued with pluralism if it wants to offer a solution when different parties are at odds with each other. Why else would there be a place for ethics besides religions and philosophies?
The moral agent
When all kinds of people fight each other out because they are firmly convinced of their own moral rightness, then ethics come into play. This phenomenon can be seen in many fields. Sometimes ethics results in strict, watertight codes that you cannot do anything with when new developments occur. Or the other extreme: ethics committees that cannot make decisions, that formulate guidelines that are so non-binding that it is even easier to make air. Of course, it can also happen that an agreement is reached.
For example, by first looking carefully at what the core of the conflict is. The Potter-Box, a classic model for making moral decisions, calls this the first step. Other models such as Henk van Luijk’s model also start with this question: what is the core moral problem? In addition, there is a good chance that different values are at stake. In the Potter-Box model, this involves digging around until you arrive at the underlying values, step number two. The decision models and step-by-step plans thus address all factors that play a role, such as possible stakeholders, people involved, ethical codes, the law
The core of the problem
The usefulness of the decision models can be summarized in one word: structure. The situation is being investigated step by step. Order emerges from chaos. For example, in Robin-Hood situations when a brutal undercover journalist wants to prevent a national disaster through manipulative techniques, blackmail and bribery. However, this does not mean that step-by-step plans necessarily lead to better decisions or that codes and committees lead the way to a utopian workplace. On the other hand, it is certain that with the help of a decision model you can better account for your choices. And it helps you to visualize convincing arguments clearly, so that you can later explain them well to, for example, your boss or the judge.
But in the case of the Robin-Hood situation: the most important thing is to tackle the core of the conflict, the first steps of the decision models. That is sufficient to get a good idea of the choice that needs to be made (possibly very quickly). It is also not necessary at all to draw up rules about, for example, undercover journalism, because that rule raises a new question (are you also undercover if you do not say that you are a journalist?), so that another rule must be drawn up. It would almost make you feel claustrophobic.
The right attitude
You might find the golden mean in virtue ethics. Certain struggles come up again and again: freedom of the press versus responsibility of the press, a juicy article versus respect, national security versus privacy of the citizens. The only thing that has to be done is to weigh those values. And if the person in question wants to make the right choice at different times under different circumstances, the decision must actually have been made a long time ago. He has to have the right attitude just like Robin Hood.