July 2014

ON ETHICS
Need to Make an Ethical Decision? There’s an App For That

Do you need help weighing the pros and cons of a decision that you’re about to make? The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California recently launched a mobile app to assist individuals with gauging if the actions they are about to take are ethically sound.

The Markkula Center focuses on working with educators, students, professionals, and organizations on ethics issues in business, government, health care, and character education. The center has a framework for ethical decision making that is designed to help when someone is confronted with a situation that’s more serious than usual and it needs to be fully thought through, says Irina Raicu, the center’s Internet ethics director. “Everything is mobile now, and it was time for the framework to go mobile as well,” she says. “We also thought that an app would be more appealing to a younger crowd.”

The center’s ethical decision making framework features the following 10-step question model:

Recognize an Ethical Issue

1. Could this decision or situation be damaging to someone or to some group? Does this decision involve a choice between a good and bad alternative, or perhaps between two “goods” or between two “bads”?
2. Is this issue about more than what is legal or what is most efficient? If so, how?

Get the Facts

3. What are the relevant facts of the case? What facts are known? Can I learn more about the situation? Do I know enough to make a decision?
4. What individuals and groups have an important stake in the outcome? Are some concerns more important? Why?
5. What are the options for acting? Have all the relevant persons and groups been consulted? Have I identified creative options?

Evaluate Alternative Actions

6. Evaluate the options by asking the following questions:

• Which option will produce the most good and do the least harm? (The Utilitarian Approach)
• Which option best respects the rights of all who have a stake? (The Rights Approach)
• Which option treats people equally or proportionately? (The Justice Approach)
• Which option best serves the community as a whole, not just some members? (The Common Good Approach)
• Which option leads me to act as the sort of person I want to be? (The Virtue Approach)

Make a Decision and Test It

7. Considering all these approaches, which option best addresses the situation?
8. If I told someone I respect or told a television audience which option I have chosen, what would they say?

Act and Reflect on the Outcome

9. How can my decision be implemented with the greatest care and attention to the concerns of all stakeholders?
10. How did my decision turn out and what have I learned from this specific situation?

The app asks the user to consider the facts of the situation and the stakeholders involved, using questions from the ethics model framework. The user can indicate how ethical he or she thinks the choice made would be from various perspectives using a ratings scale. A rating of up to 100 is based on the following five ethical approaches: utility, rights, justice, common good, and virtue. The higher the number rating, the more ethical the decision that you are about to make.

The framework and the app can serve as a teaching tool in the classroom. The center received positive feedback from an engineering professor who has used the app with his students at Mahidol University in Thailand, says Raicu. “This app is not a thorough introduction to ethics, but it’s a way of bringing up these ethical perspectives,” she says. “Every page on the app has a button that will take you to more information resources and research on ethics.”