Paper Example on Ethical Dilemmas: Ethics of Virtue

The scenario has two main ethical dilemmas that can be answered, either using the ethics of virtue or care. The first ethical dilemma is to withhold the information of what I did to get the confession. The second ethical dilemma is, do I tell the prosecutor and the suspect of what I did to get him to confess? In the scenario provided, the most immediate ethical dilemma is the second—the one on whether to tell the prosecutor about the process of obtaining a confession. I chose the ethics of virtue as the system to use to solve the most immediate ethical dilemma. I selected the ethics of virtue because honesty is one of the attributes that it emphasizes. The matter at hand is a question of whether to pursue honesty at the expense of probable justice.

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According to the ethics of virtue, a person should always act in an honest and virtuous manner rather than doing one's duty or pursuing good outcomes. In this scenario, my responsibility as a homicide investigator is to ensure the victim gets justice. Keeping quiet about my actions would probably achieve a good outcome of delivering justice to the victim. However, the ethics of virtue would require me to place the achievement of good and fulfillment of my duty to be a secondary need. The primary requirement is for me to be virtuous, and that requires me to be honest with the prosecutor regarding the case and my actions.

Based on the ethics of the virtue system, I told the prosecutor that my actions were the right thing to do. I have to ensure the victim receives justice, but I need to uphold my character and moral standing. Failure to disclose such information will be a violation of virtue and morality.

That conclusion is not the same for someone who uses a different ethical system. My classmate, who chose the ethics of care, was undoubtedly convinced about the need to keep quiet about my colleague's actions. The ethics of care is known to use a context-bound approach to provide answers to such dilemmas. The ethics of care posits that context can sometimes overrule universal codes of conduct such as honesty and justice. As a result, a system that uses ethics of care believes that withholding the prosecutor's information is the right thing to do because of the context of the situation.

Although I have understood the system used to solve the dilemma, I'm afraid I have to disagree with the conclusion reached by my classmate. I believe that some things should be incontrovertible and absolute regardless of the context of the situation. Our moral standings and virtues should be paramount in every case, and we should always move to uphold these traits, no matter the outcome of the problem. Compromising such moral standings sets precedence for subsequent violations of the same, and the process becomes recurrent.

As a result, I think that the system that came up with the best outcome was the ethics of virtue, which is the system that I used. It is the best system because it uses a simple principle that can always be implemented and followed. The ethics of care is contextual, and a decision that appeared justified to one person may be evil and unjustified to another. The ethics of care does not achieve justice because it would have denied justice to one party to give it to another. Everyone has a right to a fair trial and withholding such information from the suspect, and the prosecutor would not be granting the suspect a fair trial. However, just because I chose the ethics of virtue doesn’t mean it is my preferred system to solve the dilemma.

Given a chance, I would have chosen utilitarianism because it is the most suited to solving dilemmas. Unlike the ethics of virtue, utilitarianism uses numbers to solve such dilemmas. That is, the right action is one that does well to the highest number of people. It shares some common grounds with the ethics of care except that it focuses on the overall society rather than only the ones concerned.