Towards an integrated framework for resolving ethical dilemmas

Abstract

Ethics play a critical role in voluntarily yet collectively directing a society towards achieving peace, harmony, and prosperity. Although most cases involving ethical violations are simple and clear to resolve, some cases yield conflicts of opinion amongst the different schools of thought of ethics. Resolving these dilemmas requires first being sensitive to various ethical and unethical forces being engaged in a situation and acquiring a framework to settle the conflict between the numerous possible ethical forces. This paper proposes an integrated approach to resolving life’s ethical dilemmas. First, it refines the set of fundamental ethical values, which will help discard the confirmed unethical choices and exhaustively contain all the different prospects of acts that can be deemed ethical from different viewpoints. Further, it comprehensively enunciates the different types of ethical dilemmas that could be generated out of the conflict between the elemental values of the set of fundamental ethical values. Finally, it contributes a framework to resolve the dilemma that caters to the different possibilities of conflict generation and exhaustively settles them