Ethical Judgments (Meaning and Explanation)

We explain what ethical judgments are, their characteristics and various examples. Also, its relationship with moral judgments.

What are ethical judgments?

Ethical judgments are mental acts that allow us to judge our actions, behaviors or procedures in the face of the set of existing alternatives and the system of moral values to which we adhere as part of a society. Our capacity for ethical judgment determines the morally correct way to act or resolve a dilemma, which is why it is an important part of decision-making.

Any type of action, topic or context is susceptible to ethical judgments. In this sense, with them we can find the most morally suitable alternatives and discard those that, on the contrary, are reprehensible.

To distinguish between the two, We must turn to the codes, norms and laws that our society proposes to govern these matters, or to the deontological codes that defend and supervise professional licenses, for example. In any case, it is a reasoned decision.

Characteristics of ethical judgments

Ethical judgments are characterized by the following:

depend on a specific context and the social norms that intervene in it.
Reason and conscious thought intervene in them.
Evaluate alternatives to behavior and the ways in which a dilemma can be resolved, rather than simply focusing on whether something is right or wrong, good or bad.

Examples of ethical judgments

Examples of the application of ethical judgments are situations such as the following:

The wife of a university professor decides to pursue the career in which she teaches and enrolls in her subject. The professor, after much thought, decides that there is a conflict of interest and that he cannot objectively evaluate his wife. Therefore, he must choose between asking his wife to enroll in the subject with another professor, or to withdraw the subject that semester and enroll it when he no longer teaches it.
An international criminal is captured decades after committing the crime, when he is an old and sickly man. International justice must, then, decide what is the ethical way to proceed to deliver justice: sentence him to an ordinary prison, sentence him to house arrest, or sentence him to community service.
In the midst of a pandemic, when hospitals are overcrowded, a resident doctor is on call when five patients decompensate and require admission to the ICU. However, there is capacity for only three of them. The doctor decides that the criterion for selecting who goes to the ICU and who does not will be the probability of survival. But based on what? The age of the patient? The existence or non-existence of comorbidity factors?

Relationship with moral judgments

Moral judgments are distinguished from ethical judgments in that the former consist of mental evaluations of right and wrong, that is, good and bad. That is to say, moral judgments aspire to truth denying or affirming the moral value of a behavior or decision, and therefore are handled in absolute terms.

On the other hand, an ethical judgment is always limited to a set of options or decisions to be made, and therefore is handled in applied terms, that is, more pragmatic, less universal.

Let's look at an example to understand this difference. Suppose a company decides to test a new flu drug on a group of volunteers, without warning them about the side effects. A moral judgment in this regard would simply condemn the action as immoral or “bad,” for endangering the volunteers and preventing them from making a conscious and informed decision.

On the other hand, an ethical judgment is one that would look for the appropriate way to resolve the situation in a moral way, that is, one that would propose moral alternatives to such behavior, such as informing patients beforehand or testing the drug on animals first.