A Framework for Ethical Decision Making Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

Unlike in ordered systems , or chaotic systems , in a complex system the agents and the system constrain one another, especially over time. This means that we cannot forecast or predict what will happen. Though a complex system may, in retrospect, appear to be ordered and predictable, hindsight does not lead to foresight because the external conditions and systems constantly change. The interactions are nonlinear, and minor changes can produce disproportionately major consequences.

• The following are important terms used in making moral judgments about particular actions.
• All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article.
• Ethical environmental action, then, is the one that produces the greatest good and does the least harm for all who are affected—government, corporations, the community, and the environment.
• Simple contexts are characterized by stability and clear cause-and-effect relationships that are easily discernible by everyone.
• They can, in certain circumstances, purposefully change the systems in which they operate to equilibrium states in order to create predictable outcomes.

When choosing, let’s say, a fridge, you can have too many criteria and too many options. In this case, the decision-making session would take too much effort and time. Please note, this decision-making framework doesn’t help you single out one option but rather helps deep dive into the context of a problem so that you can make a carefully weighed decision. The appropriate worksheet may be distributed to all participants to help keep the process on track. It should be worked through one section at a time, recognising that ethical decision-making is not always linear. You may have to go back and revisit earlier steps in the process as additional questions arise or facts emerge. Gokul Rajaram, Caviar Lead at Square“Once you do a quick assessment of the importance of your choice and start using the decision-making framework over and over, something happens.

Logic Tree framework

When using the frameworks to make ethical judgments about specific cases, it will be useful to follow the process below. In many situations, all three frameworks will result in the same—or at least very similar—conclusions about what you should do, although they will typically give different reasons for reaching those conclusions. Justice is the idea that each person should be given their due, and what people are due is often interpreted as fair or equal treatment. Equal treatment implies that people should be treated as equalsaccording to some defensible standard such as merit or need, but not necessarily that everyone should be treated in the exact same way in every respect. There are different types of justice that address what people are due in various contexts. These include social justice , distributive justice , corrective justice , retributive justice , and restorative or transformational justice . Many people want to make gorgeous decisions that have perfect outcomes.

• Complicated contexts may contain multiple right answers, and though there is a clear relationship between cause and effect, not everyone can see it.
• For instance, if you need to choose among multiple similar options with various characteristics, we’d recommend the Dimensionality reduction framework.
• We listed all the options and criteria in our table.
• (See the sidebar “Tools for Managing in a Complex Context.”) They will discern many opportunities for innovation, creativity, and new business models.
• Every decision has two sets of ideas.
• This paper showed how addiction can be conceptualized as a disease of the habit valuation system, using a simple modification of the reinforcement-learning model.

SN and MA screened the reviews for final study inclusion. SN and MA conducted data collection and cleaning.

A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making

To shake up the decision-making gridlock, Shklarski developed a framework based on a model introduced to him by his executive coach Marcy Swenson. The matrix, nicknamed the “Xanax decision making framework for decision-making” among his team members at Flatiron, has enabled his increasingly autonomous and fragmented team to keep moving fast and smart through tough choices.

In this realm of “known knowns,” leaders must first assess the facts of a situation—that is, “sense” it—then categorize and respond to it. Test your ethical decision-making skills with short cases based on real-world scenarios.

Types of the decision making framework

This fMRI study argued that competing goal-directed valuation systems play a part in decisions that involve choosing between immediate small monetary payoffs and larger but delayed payoffs. An important difference between habitual and goal-directed systems has to do with how they respond to changes in the environment. The goal-directed system updates the value of an action as soon as the value of its outcome changes, whereas the habit system only learns with repeated experience. Habit valuation systems learn to assign values to stimulus–response associations on the basis of previous experience through a process of trial-and-error. Examples of habits include a smoker’s desire to have a cigarette at particular times of day and a rat’s tendency to forage in a cue-dependent location after sufficient training. Each EPD squad will have a Product Manager, Development Lead, and Design lead.

It also does not provide a way to determine which duty we should follow if we are presented with a situation in which two or more duties conflict. It can also be rigid in applying the notion of duty to everyone regardless of personal situation. This even-handedness encourages treating everyone with equal dignity and respect. In the Duty framework, we focus on the duties and obligations that we have in a given situation, and consider what ethical obligations we have and what things we should never do.