Like other former high school students, I was confronted with the difficult dilemma of choosing what to do after graduation. This is a typical situation, but for each individual, an incredibly important one, in so far as a decision made at this time will have profound effects on one’s future. I was considering various options, such as working or continuing my schooling in higher education. At the same time, another option appeared to me to be viable: to join the military. I contemplated this option for some months, eventually narrowing down the problem of what to do with my life to two options: continuing higher education or joining the military.
As I began to research more into the specifics of the American military, the military option no longer became tenable. This is because I did not merely approach the question from what can the military do for me, but what does the military itself do. I researched extensively into geopolitics and alternative viewpoints and found the use of the U.S. military in imperialistic wars throughout the world morally reprehensible. Accordingly, through a process of elimination, the military option vanished entirely, leaving me with the higher education option. Nevertheless, the logic behind my decision making when faced with the problem of what to do with my future was ultimately determined by an ethical commitment. Critical problems which require a resolution are best approached from an ethical standpoint.
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"A Difficult Problem I Had to Solve".
Now, this in itself seems to be perhaps, at first glance, a somewhat ambiguous thesis. Could not any type of decision making process in light of a problem ultimately be termed ethical? For example, a decision in favor of joining the military could also be considered ethical, to the extent that patriotism is viewed by the individual as an important ethical conviction. In this regard, someone with a different ethical commitment than my own would arrive at the exact opposite decision I made. Or, from another perspective, someone who fully supports a hedonistic capitalist ideology could say that his or her ethical commitments are ultimately to individual freedom and happiness, at the expense of the community and others. This person would therefore also justify his or decision based on ethics, although the majority of individuals may find the choice made and how the problem was resolved contemptible.
In this regard, when I state that “critical problems which require a resolution are best approached from an ethical statement”, the meaning of ethics itself has to be clarified. This, of course, is an enormous philosophical problem for the last two thousand years. However, the thesis can be supported from various perspectives. Firstly, not all critical problems which require a resolution are ultimately based on ethics. For example, a manager could decide to lay off one thousand employees because he needs to meet his budget. His ethical commitments could be said to be the budget over the employees, since that is what governed his decision. This, I would argue, is not an ethical decision however, since the manager has made uncritical reflections on what he values, in this case the budget. In other words, when approaching a problem from the perspective of ethics, we are engaged in an exercise of critical thinking where some fundamental values determine what we will do.
This leads to the second key point related to this thesis: a robust argument against ethical relativism. Ethical relativism in the academic literature refers to a position whereby all actions can ultimately be deemed ethical – there are no absolute moral principles which guide us, but only different interpretations and perspectives. I think from a critical perspective, such a position is untenable, since it basically is the elimination of the possibility of ethics itself. Hence, in order to develop the thesis that a difficult problem is always best approached from an ethical standpoint, I will, firstly, need to refute ethical relativism, and secondly, build a positive model of shared values and ethical commitments, demonstrating why the use of this model is the best approach when confronted with our individual problems.
