In "The Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King, Jr. says that a person is justified in civil disobedience (defying a law) when a law is unjust. He defines a just law the following way:
1. A law is just when it squares with the moral, eternal, and natural law.
2. A law is just when it upholds human dignity.
3. A law is just when it is universally binding.
Thomas Hobbes believed that human beings in a state of nature default to which ethical theory?
egoism
The Golden Mean is best described this way:
The most moderate point between deficiency and excess for any given virtue.
Select from this list those statements that most accurately reflect Rachels' five tenets of Cultural Relativism?
There is no objective standard that can be used to judge one society's code as better than another's. In other words, there is no "universal truth" in ethics; there are no moral truths that hold for all people at all times.
It is mere arrogance for us to
This (These) statement(s) about American Values presented in the Zoom session and Powerpoint slides from the second week of the class are accurate:
The U.S. Constitution laid out the need for three branches of government, democratic elections, and that public administrators swear an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution.
The Declaration of Independence provided a moral justification for revolution aga
In his ethical dissertation Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers the following concept(s):
Human beings were born to function well as rational persons demonstrating virtue.
The aim which all good people strive for is the final end which is self-sufficient and the end of action. All other goods pursue this final end. This final end for all manki
Which of the following statements are consistent with Immanuel Kant's second maxim in his categorical imperative as presented in the Rachels book: human beings should never be treated merely as a means but as an end?
Human beings occupy a special place in creation.
Human beings have no direct duty to treat animals a certain way. They are merely a means to an end. That end is man.
Since people have desires and goals, all other things have value for them. So, those othe
Identify the properly described ethical system that focuses on end results and is either act-based or rule-based from the following list of options (Hint: there's more than one correct answer).
Utilitarianism - maximizing utility, or pleasure, for the greatest number.
Consequentialism - a view that prioritizes the consequences of certain actions or rules in determining the rightness of any given action.
Teleological Ethics - a system that focuse
Identify whether the following moral statements taken by themselves are either objective or subjective:
(2) A murder is more repulsive if the offender targeted the victim out of bigotry than for some other reason.
(2) The wickedness of police brutality depends on which oppressed class an officer or victim belongs to.
(2) Incest is gross because it can lead
Match each of the following terms or phrases with the example that best represents it.
Honesty - Value
My moral obligation to tell the truth to others - Duty
People should be honest - Principle
The moral obligation of others not to be truthful to me - Right
Habitually telling the truth. - Virtue
Having the character trait of deception - Vic
The two most widely known developers of utilitarianism are Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The difference between them is best characterized this way:
Mill prioritized higher level pleasures (intellectual, artistic, social, cultural, etc) over lower level ones (immediate gratification).
In chapter 4 of the Pojman & Fieser text, they speak about the Good Life and the Happiness Machine. The main point they are making is:
Happiness is more than the perceived experience of pleasure alone.
Pleasure is attained when these five things are me: 1) action, 2) freedom, 3) character, and 4) relationships
As presented in the Zoom, powerpoint, and Pojan & Fieser text, place the following steps of the moral schema in their proper order:
1. Rational Justification
2. Forms of Life
3. Values
4. Principles
5. Judgements
6. Decision
7. Actions
From the chapter on utilitarianism entitled "A Teleological Approach," author Gerald Pops states that public administrators utilize teleological ethics when they focus on results. Identify the example(s) he provided from the following list:
Achievement of policy objectives
Obtaining consensus for action
Surviving as an individual or organization
Obtaining group participation in the policy making process
There are two kinds of "goods" that ethicists depend upon. One of them is worthy of desire because of its very nature. The other kind of good is worthy of desire because it serves as an effective means for attaining some other good. These are best describ
Instrumental Goods are beneficial because they serve as effective means of attaining Intrinsic Goods.
Medicine could be considered an instrumental good in that it accomplishes the intrinsic good of health or happiness.
The two-word term Aristotle used to describe the skill of applying moral knowledge in everyday life which develops as we mature is
Practical Wisdom
The one-word name for the authority coined by Thomas Hobbes that ensures social cooperation in a state of nature is called the
Leviathan_
The "Fact-Value Problem," "Naturalistic Fallacy, or the "Is-Ought Dilemma" are most consistent with this (or these) statement(s):
A purely natural world does not inherently contain values that prescribe the way things ought to be but only describes how things in fact are.
The powerpoint presentation and video posted in week 6 on Deontological Ethics focused on these two images to represent the two maxims in Kant's Categorical Imperative (universality and humanity).
Babies and Bananas
Emotivism is most consistent with the following statements:
There is no such thing as right or wrong.
Morality is purely an expression of emotion. Any appearance of good or evil is purely illusory.
Emotivism is an example of subjective ethics.
Place these decision-making steps in their proper order:
Gather the facts
Determine the Ethical Issues
Determine what values/principles have bearing on the case
Identify alternatives
Compare alternatives with the virtues/principles
Consider the consequences
Decide
In the lecture on decision making, an example I provided reasoned through the decision about whether or not to apprehend a ____________ in my neighborhood.
Bike thief
An ethical dilemma is primarily which one of the following options?
two or more moral issues at conflict (values, duties, principles, virtues/vices, rights, etc).
Dr. Terry Cooper provides several illustrative cases of conflicts in chapter 5 of his book The Responsible Administrator part of the assigned reading in this module. In one case, Corporal Montague reasons through a conflict and identifies several alternat
beliefs
Values
Principles
In Scott Rae's hypothetical examples of various ethical perspectives on the issue of euthanasia in chapter 4 of his book Moral Choices from this module's assigned readings, which ethical system(s) was/were represented from the following options?
Relativism
Utilitarianism
Deontological Ethics
Virtue Ethics
Both in the Zoom session for week 9 and Cooper's chapter 5, conflicts were discussed. Which types of conflicts were presented from the following list?
Role
Authority
Interest
The example presented in Cooper chapter 5 involving the Rancor County Sheriff Department involved which of the following conflicting ethical issues?
Respect from the staff
Trust from agency management
Outside employment opportunity
In the first chapter of Practical Wisdom, Schwartz & Sharpe tell us that organizational leaders make two assumptions when employing rules/administrative oversight and when they employ rewards/incentives to encourage ethical conduct of their members. The a
they need to be told what that is.
In Chapter 3 of Practical Wisdom, the authors cite examples from founding fathers James Madison and John Adams showing their confidence in the US Constitution as a means to control ethical behavior in government. The authors are less confident about the e
Jones
In Chapter 3 of Practical Wisdom, the authors make the striking claim that "empathy has its dark side" and "too much seeing things from the other's perspective, can cloud judgement." The reason for this, is that it can impede the decision maker's
objectivity and decisive action
In the Moral Reasoning video lecture, I provided which of the following examples to illustrate real life conflicts for public administrators?
A paddle board surfer in Malibu
A hairdresser in Texas
A mother in Wisconsin
A police officer in Washington State
From the lecture on Organizational Culture, the various ways researchers use to assess the organizational culture of a public agency did NOT include this one:
Undercover cameras
The term used to describe someone who violates loyalty to their organization to report unethical conduct out of loyalty to the public risking retaliation is described in the Cooper text as a(n):
whistleblower
As stated in the lecture referencing Cooper chapter 7, Kathryn Denhardt urges any effort to reform ethics in an organization must recognize the "importance of dealing with which two groups simultaneously?
individual member ethics
organizational structure
The two ethical decisions illustrated in the book, Practical Wisdom, that re-appeared in Chapter 4 involved Judge Forer and Dr. Lowentsein and the following two situations:
sentencing a robbery suspect.
giving cancer diagnosis to a patient.
The concept the authors intended to explain in Chapter 4 of Practical Wisdom with examples of a rectangle, kiwi, wine, gas, the game of tag, and sentencing rules for armed robbery were used to illustrate which one of the following concepts?
category
Rohr chapter 1 introduced the "Spoilsmen" controversy. This is described best from which of the following options?
a debate on how public administrators were appointed to their positions.
The Rohr chapter 1 text refutes a dichotomy argued by a public administration scholar (and future US president) that was primarily between these two concepts.
politics
administration
In the Zoom lecture, Cooper text, and slides from week 11, three levels of analysis were discussed that cultural anthropologists use to categorize their observations within organizations. Which level is the one most likely to influence real ethical change
basic assumptions (and worldview)
Choose two of these options below to fill in the blanks:
Chapter 4 of Practical Wisdom, references Aristotle by stating "Whether and how to follow rules depends on an appreciation of
______________that ethical decisions could never be derived from a set o
practical wisdom
context
Select three options from the below list to fill in each of these blanks:
When Cooper discusses the Milgram experiment in chapter 8, he suggests the high rate of compliance among the test subjects willing to administer lethal shocks shows us that the indi
hierarchical
conscience
agentic
Choose two options from the following list to fill in these two blanks:
Rohr's chapter one explains how the shift away from a political appointee based system on to a merit-based civil service led to a vast increase in bureaucratic discretion for unelecte
concreteness
abstractness