Aaron Poelker's Journal: Section 5
1.One paragraph summary of the key idea summarizing the topic of the week. I think the key idea of this section is the overall ethical way humans should make decisions in their lives. We have seen instances in which people have acted unethically/immorally in war, the massacre at My Lai, business, Carl Icahn and his corporate raiding of TWA, and also ethical questions have arisen in the field of medicine, the question of treatment or non-treatment. Even though unethical actions seem to dominant this world we have also seen men like Aaron Fewerstein who in the face of losing his family business after a fire destroyed his textile factory still paid his employee’s full salary and began constructing a new factory costing his company millions of dollars. In today’s world men like Aaron Fewerstein and Jim Goodnight might not be as prevalent or obvious as are the men from Enron but we must seek these stories out because they provide a good example about how to treat people in the world of business. We should always strive to be ethical, and even though our actions will probably never be as advertised like the soldiers at My Lai or Jim Goodnight we can still set an example as to how to live morally and ethically.
2. List and explain three of the most important ideas you want to remember from this week. Discrimination. discrimination is stated as “noncombatants must be immune from direct attack.” I believe this is a critical quality in the Jus In Bello theory of war. I believe the soldiers at My Lai, although the soldiers were following direct orders, did violate this important quality. In war civilians must be spared from the depravity of war, which does not happen all the time. A just war must be in pursuit of justice and any time civilians lives are lost due to an act of warfare is leading to more injustice than that act of warfare could have ever brought about justice. Jim Goodnight. I found Jim Goodnight to utterly charming in the ways he treated his employees at SAS. Although all of the commodities he gave to his employees (daycare for their children, putting green, state-of-the-art fitness center, a low cost country club, etc...) the most appealing thing about him was that he would deprive himself of riches compared to Bill Gates just so he would have happy employees ultimately leading to more productivity. Jim Goodnight is a pioneer in the field of business with the crazy idea of making him employees happy. In times like today, the working class is often exploited but Jim Goodnight has never laid off one single employee and that to me is the most astonishing thing of all. Heather Wilson. I found this story to be a very touching story about a girl in desperate need for a liver. The ethical question that arose was when her uncle volunteered to let the doctors transplant part of his liver to save Heather. Is it ok for the possible death of one person to save another? The procedure ultimately never took place because Heather’s uncles liver did not correctly match up with hers. The question of transplanting half of a healthy liver to save this girl brings about bigger issues such as the selling of internal organs or strangers volunteering to save someone.
3. One image of that reminds you of the topic. Attribute, link, your source.
Source:Ethical?
4. What the most relevant question for you from this section? Why not take some time to answer your question?
I think the most relevant/obvious question for me is am I living an ethical life? Am I striving to practice the ethics I have been taught in my life? Even though I am not making decisions about killing people or about liver transplants I believe that ethical questions arise everyday in my life. Am I giving to the poor? Am I striving to help the people in my community who need it the most?
5.What should you try to do to make you a better person, a more moral person, from this study of these three key issues?
I think I need to be more aware of situations in my life that call for ethical decision making. I think sometimes I brush off the situations in my life calling for a moral decision to be made, I brush it off by either not dealing with it or failing to live up to the moral guidelines in my life. I also need to become more aware of unethical practices in the world whether it be in war, medicine, or business.
