(a) Right, wrong, and okay: A knowledge of right and wrong is not something that schools can simply pass on. The term ‘develop’ recognises that people do not acquire principles of right and wrong just by being told them. To be aware of principles, to really appreciate what they mean, to take them seriously, internalise them – all this comes gradually. It needs to be developed in individuals.
The current wording does not actually say that the principles developed will be the same principles for every person. It leaves open the possibility that in different people different principles will be developed for distinguishing between right and wrong. The leader writers may assume that there is just one correct set of principles, but that is something that teachers – and surely their students too – should be able to think about, not take for granted.
Thus, it is misleading to divide all acts into two categories, ethically right and ethically wrong. Rather, it is better to think of acts as either ethically obligatory, ethically prohibited or ethically acceptable.
(b) Distinguish wrong and harm: the basic core of the notion of `harm’, insofar as it is of interest to the law, seems to be that of a `harmed condition’; someone is in the condition of being harmed: a setback to interests has occurred. But clearly there are `harms’ so understood in which the law’s interest will rapidly vanish. A person whose heart failure results from the natural course of disease is in the same harmed condition (in this sense of `harmed condition’) as one whose heart failure results from the ingestion of deliberately administered poison. This point leads to the thought that the notion required for jurisprudential purposes is not so much `harm’ as `wrong’ or unjustified violation of right. Not all harms are wrongs (suppose I put the poison into your drink by accident). So the focus has to be on that subset of harms that are also wrongs.
This train of thought leads to what has been called by Duff the `conduct-cause-harm’ or `consequentialist’ model of wrongdoing (Duff 1990, 105–11; Duff 2002, 58). The coercive force of the law is properly used only against those whose conduct causes (or threatens or makes more likely) harm to another — in short, the law should proceed according to the Harm Principle. This model in terms of the Harm Principle raises two different kinds of questions. The first set of questions has to do with the scope of the Principle, and the second set has to do with the model itself.
Conclusion. These are large and complex issues, and are not settled here. But this much is clear. Within the liberal democratic tradition, the concept of harm can have a valid use at a high level of generality and abstraction to gesture towards a large area of the law’s concern with the control of human action. To encapsulate this concern in the Harm Principle is permissible. But to do that is not the same as using the Harm Principle mechanically as a concrete guide to the design of the law. It is much too inexact for that. If one is coming from a long way outside the liberal democratic tradition, then to arrive at the point where the Harm Principle seems to get everything right is hard, but worthwhile, work. However, within the liberal democratic tradition, to arrive at the Harm Principle is easy. The hard work lies ahead.
(Duff, R. 2001. `Harms and Wrongs’. Buffalo Criminal Law Review 5:13–45; Duff, R. 2002. `Rule-Violations and Wrong-Doing’. In Criminal Law Theory: Doctrines of the General Part, eds S. Shute and A. Simester, 47–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press.)
(c) Separating goals from constraints: Most problems in management involve multiple goals and two approaches to solving managerial problems have been suggested: optimizing and satisfying. The first covers methods of trade-offs, optimizing in tandem, conversion of goals into constraints and goal programming. The second mainly centers on norm setting and on interval programming. It is argued that cost-benefit analysis essentially belongs to the first group and that, contrary to some suggestions, the differences between the industrial and public sectors (as far as O.R. is concerned) are not related to differences between the optimizing and satisficing philosophies. (http://www.jstor.org/pss)
(d) Personal preference and ethics: Ethics, or morality, is a system of principles that helps us tell right from wrong, good from bad.
This definition, by itself, tells us nothing about the standard by which we establish or measure right and wrong. The centuries have seen many different approaches to ethics; none seem to be satisfactory. The terms 'ethics', and even more so, 'morality' carry heavy emotional baggage. Traditional approaches to morality are confused and contradictory. While supposedly telling us what is 'right' or 'good' for us, they variously imply sacrificing our lives to some Greater Good, restrict beneficial sexual conduct, oppose our legitimate desire for personal happiness or offer supposedly ideal, but impractical solutions.
Ethics is about the choices that we make - or fail to make. We are aware of our conscious thoughts and of our ability to make informed, intelligent choices - that is what we call free will We are aware that the choices that we make have consequences, both for ourselves and for others. We are aware of the responsibility that we have for our actions. But, we do not have reliable inherent knowledge or instincts that will automatically promote our survival and flourishing. We may have an inherent emotional desire to survive and avoid pain, but we do not have innate knowledge about how to achieve those objectives. A rational, non-contradictory ethic can help us make better choices regarding our lives and well-being. Issues not subject to our choice - unknown to us or outside of our control - are not moral issues. (http://www.optimal.org/peter/rational_ethics)
(e) Law and ethics: Information ethics are the rules that define right and wrong behavior in the computing professions. They are the basis for trust and cooperation among workers and organizations. For this reason, and because of some much-publicized ethics problems in the computer field, ethical computing has gotten a lot of attention lately. This means that now more than ever all people who use a computer, including you, need to know what's expected of them – what's OK to do with a computer and what's not OK. In most cases the owner of a given computer defines the ethics and/or rules required to use that computer. It is important to realize ethics and laws are not the same. Laws are established to protect software developers (copyright and licensing) and users (privacy issues). Laws have penalties associated with them. If you don’t obey the law, you are punished. Ethics, however, are based on principles and values. In reality, there is no global punishment for ethics violation, although individual companies, schools, etc. may have rules that, if violated, have punishments associated with them.
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