Decision Making Essays - Ethics, Ethical Decision, Conscience

Decision Making Essays - Ethics, Ethical Decision, Conscience Decision Making Any decision affecting people has ethical ramifications and virtually all important decisions reflect the decision- maker?s mindfulness and resolution to ethical behavior. This is why it is important to know for yourself how you go about making ethical decisions, or decisions of any kind. Finding out how one goes about making decisions can be a rather hard task as I found out while I was researching my mind to ?decide? exactly how I do go about making the decisions I make. The first thing I decided was that most of the decisions I make in my life are made with much thought about anything that might be affected by the decision. The most important thing, to me, is to make a decision and have reasons. I have to know why one choice is better than another. I feel compelled to look at every angle to assess what will be the outcome. I, personally, have a hard time making ?spur-of-the-moment? decisions especially if it involves something rather important to me. Many things! go through my mind and trust in my practical intuition (notice I didn?t say ?blind? intuition) also plays an important part. I make decisions based on different things depending on what kind of decision I am having to make, but there is always one ultimate source for my decision making that supersedes all other ?sub-categories? that influence my decision making, and that does not change, regardless of the situation ? and that is God. To me, God is the supreme ethical teacher and giver of wisdom, and if this is true then when searching for wisdom, why shouldn?t I look to the originator of wisdom. God is my number one influence in any decision that I make. My love for Him and faith in His power causes me to adhere to His will and actively search out the text of the Bible in order to learn more about the way He wants me to live and the things He wants me to have in my heart and in my mind as a guide for myself when making decisions. It is through this searching that I have discovered which ethical principles are important to me and how to adopt them as my own. One does not have to be a Christian to have ?values?. Everyone has a primary source from which they draw to make decisions and it is often their values. The important thing is how or where you obtained your values. Are they yours or did someone else just pass them down to you. I have values, but the values I hold in my heart are not merely of tradition passed down to me, but spring from a diligent study of the Bible, which again comes from my love of the Father (which by-the-way, exists because of His great love for me). So, in this light, for me as a Christian or a non- Christian, values provide the very motivation for decision-making in the first place. I therefore decide to make decisions for myself because I want my life to adhere to the values that encompass my heart. I want to live my life constantly aware of the presence of God, and therefore, train my thoughts to become value-focused, and since the values in my heart are an extension of the Father, then I ough! t always to ask myself ?What have I done that is as God wills and what have I left undone of that which He does not will. Another word that has a similar connotation as the values that I am discussing is virtues. Virtues are ideal character traits that people should incorporate into their lives such as: honesty, loyalty, respect, etc. For myself, this also is primarily obtained from my study of the Bible. I need to address the fact that in growing up in a family that held strongly to the values or virtues it was taught by their parents, that it is, in fact, nearly impossible not to be influenced by these things that were taught in the family, whether they were bad or good, and say that all values and virtues are entirely my own and have originated within me. That