Ethics Exam Chapter 3&4

Restorative Justice

An approach to corrective justice that focuses on meeting the needs of all concerned.

Innocence Project

An organization (www.innocenceproject.org) staffed by lawyers and students who reexamine cases and provide legal assistance to convicts when there is a probability that serious errors occurred in their prosecution.

Sanctuary

Ancient right based on church power; allowed a person respite from punishment if he or she was within the confines of church grounds.

Define Aristotle's distributive and corrective justice.

Aristotle described two forms of justice: distributive justice (which concerns the fair distribution of goods and opportunities in society) and corrective justice (which concerns the fair resolution in controversies when unjust enrichment or unfair advantage occurs, either through civil or criminal wrongs).

Moral Identity

Composed of moral agency, which involves intent, anticipation of consequences, and self-regulation; and moral efficacy, which is the belief that one can successfully decide to act in moral ways.

Recognition Tests

Composed of moral agency, which involves intent, anticipation of consequences, and self-regulation; and moral efficacy, which is the belief that one can successfully decide to act in moral ways.

Substantive Justice

Concerns just deserts—in other words, the appropriate amount of punishment for a crime.

Due Process

Constitutionally mandated procedural steps designed to eliminate error in any governmental deprivation of protected liberty, life, or property.

Veil of Ignorance

Rawls' idea that people will develop fair principles of distribution only if they are ignorant of their position in society, so to get objective judgments, the decision maker must not know how the decision would affect him or her.

Confirmatory Bias

Fixating on a preconceived notion and ignoring other possibilities, such as focusing on a specific suspect during a police investigation.

Kolhberg's Moral Stages

Hierarchical moral development described as stages; each higher developmental stage is described as moving away from pure egoism toward altruism.

Become familiar with organizational influences on behavior.

In addition to small work groups, the organization itself can also affect ethical decision making of individuals. Reward structures, leadership, and training all can either incentivize or discourage unethical behavior. Research on organizational justice indicates that employees who perceive they are being treated fairly are more likely to engage in organizational citizenship behavior. Research on training and ethics programs indicate that they can be successful in affecting the level of unethical behavior in the workplace.

Describe biological influences on ethical behavior.

Individual explanations of behavior include biological theories, which propose that we commit good or bad acts because of biological predispositions, which may be inherited or not. Attention has focused on brain chemicals, such as oxytocin, that influence behavior. Research indicates that both the rational and emotion centers of the brain are implicated in ethical choices. Biological sex differences may be an influence on men's and women's predisposition to crime and, also, unethical behavior.

Self-effiency

Individuals' feelings of competence and confidence in their own abilities and power, developed by comparing self to others.

Hedonistic Calculus

Jeremy Bentham's rationale for calculating the potential rewards of a crime so that the amount of threatened pain could be set to deter people from committing that crime.

Distributive Justice

Justice that concerns what measurement should be used to allocate society's resources.

Corrective Justice

Justice that concerns when unfair advantage or unjust enrichment occurs (either through contract disputes or criminal action) and what the appropriate remedy might be to right the wrong.

Describe civil disobedience and when it may be appropriate.

Laws that may be subject to civil disobedience must be immoral and unjust. For instance, they could be degrading, discriminatory, enacted by unrepresentative authorities, or unjustly applied. Civil disobedience must be nonviolent, there should be no other alternative, one must accept the legal consequences, and there should be a major moral issue at stake. If people of good will disagree on the matter, then civil disobedience is not appropriate.

Describe research that addresses work group influences on behavior.

Research indicates that adults can be influenced by peers and, especially, small groups in ethical decision making. Bandura's moral disengagement theory explained that individuals behaved ethically through self-regulatory mechanisms (conscience) but that these mechanisms could be "turned off" through cognitive restructuring using the following: moral justification (appealing to higher principles), euphemistic labeling (downplaying the seriousness of the act), making comparisons (arguing it isn't as bad as something else), displacing responsibility (arguing someone else is at fault), diffusion of responsibility (by acting in a mob), disregarding the consequences (acting in such a way to ignore the effect of one's action), and dehumanization (pretending one's victims are less than human).

Explain the concept of restorative justice and the programs associated with it.

Restorative justice puts the emphasis on making the victim whole and maintaining bonds between the community, the victim, and the offender. Types of restorative justice programs include victim-offender mediation (or victim-offender reconciliation programs), reparative boards, family group conferencing, and circle sentencing.

Reinforcement

Rewards

Describe psychological theories that attempt to explain individual differences in behavior.

Learning theory argues that our behavior is based on the rewards we have received in our past. Albert Bandura's more sophisticated social learning theory presents the individual as an active participant in adapting and interpreting the rewards of his or her environment. Lawrence Kohlberg's moral stage theory explains that people's behavior is influenced by the intellectual and emotional stage of development and that one reaches or does not reach higher stages of development based on environmental factors. Kohlberg's theory proposes a hierarchy of moral stages, with the highest stage holding the most perfect moral principles, which are universal. Carol Gilligan found that women were more likely to have a stage 3 relationship orientation to ethical judgments, while men were more likely to have a stage 4 "law-and-order" orientation.

Modeling

Learning theory concept that people learn behaviors, values, and attitudes through relationships; they identify with another person and want to be like that person and pattern themselves after the "model."

Describe the three themes included in the definition of justice.

Most definitions of justice include the concepts of fairness (equal treatment), equality (equal shares), and impartiality (absence of bias). Justice acts to mediate our impulses of selfishness and fairness. Justice is distinguished from goodness.

Impartiality

Not favoring one party or interest more than another.

Utilitarian Justice

The type of justice that looks to the greatest good for all as the end.

Bounded Ethicality

This concept refers to the cognitive structuring whereby decisions are interpreted using variables that do not include ethics; for instance, companies evaluate decisions based only on economic factors rather than whether the action is moral.

Developmental Theories

Psychological theories that identify and chart individuals' normal growth phases in areas such as morality and emotional maturity.

Ethical Fading

This concept refers to the situation whereby decision makers, who might have initially questioned whether an action was ethical or not, over time drop that element of the discussion and concentrate on other factors so that the decision is eventually made without taking into consideration whether it is ethical or not.

Equality

The same value, rights, or treatment between all in a specific group.

Distinguish between substantive justice and procedural justice, including how procedural justice impacts wrongful convictions and perceptions of racial discrimination.

Substantive justice concerns the inherent fairness of a law or punishment. One issue of substantive justice is fair punishment. Punishment can be supported by either retributive or utilitarian rationales. Procedural justice is concerned with the steps taken before punishment is administered. For instance, a substantive justice question would be "Is capital punishment just?" while a procedural justice question would be "What due process should apply before a decision of capital punishment is just?" Procedural justice research shows that when people are treated in conformance to justice concepts (voice, neutrality, equity, and dignity), they feel the entire justice system is more legitimate. When procedural justice is not followed, wrongful convictions are more likely to occur and groups of citizens (especially minorities) feel that justice professionals treat them unfairly.

Retributive Justice

The component of justice that concerns the determination and methods of punishment.

Procedural Justice

The component of justice that concerns the steps taken to reach a determination of guilt, punishment, or other conclusion of law.

Fairness

The condition of being impartial, the allocation of equal shares or equal opportunities.

Become familiar with cultural and societal influences on ethical behavior.

The public can affect the ethical climate of an organization in what messages organizational leaders and members receive as to what will be tolerated and what will not be. When the public places more value on winning than sportsmanship in sports, organizations are more likely to break rules; when the public reelects politicians convicted of criminal transgressions, the message is received that the rules don't matter; and, when political leaders say no changes are needed, no change will probably occur in patterns of police behavior. The public exerts power in pressuring legislators to enact laws and regulations, but also in the normative pressure displayed in public opinion.

Justice

The quality of being impartial, fair, and just; derived from the Latin justitia, concerning rules or law.

Civil Disobedience

Voluntarily breaking established laws based on one's moral beliefs.