Moral and Ethical Decision Making and Risk Management

Risk management has the end goal of allowing the individual to better assess a difficult situation by allowing us to reach a well informed and carefully weighed decision when faced with certain risk factors. While the severity of certain risks can be calculated with mathematical formulae that can help in the decision process, though, most often than not, these techniques usually prove false and thus are useless.

In the past, risk management has simply been seen as a tool to avoid any unnecessary threats and it is constantly being addressed for improvements on dealing with these threats and to find the best solution to the problem. However, having a fundamental understanding of how we make such judgments can help lead us to better gauge and employ these factors in problematic risk management decisions. While we each have our own intricate and distinctive internal set of guidelines by which we handle ourselves and guide our decisions, here is a list of the top five approaches to ethics which can be used by managers to lead to better risk assessment decision making.

1. One of these methods, the utilitarian standard of ethics, seeks the decision that will produce the greatest amount of good for the largest number of people, or, on the other hand, to cause the least amount of harm. This may seem noble in intention but one must address the harm that is being caused and where, and whom is being harmed.

2. Another strategy for determining ethical behavior attempts to address the inherent rights of people and seeks to avoid violating those rights. This method tries to treat everyone equally and fairly, as well as avoiding seeing individuals as just tools, and any action that infringes upon another's rights is deemed unethical.

3. The justice approach to ethics believes that, while people may be treated unequally in regards to their ranking and that all individuals must be treated fairly nevertheless. The degree of these individuals' equality and ranking should be centered upon their experience and skills. Those with higher or lower skill sets being grouped accordingly and thus treated in correlation to this grouping.

4. In a method which seeks to strive for the common good, the betterment of the community is evaluated according to other needs, so that the benefit of the whole trumps the good of the few, this leads the individual to view themselves as nothing more than a piece of a larger more important machine.

5. The standard which pursues to uphold the virtue that states that, though we as human beings are flawed, this should not deter us from trying to be better. The greatest benefits for both the individual and the community together are the solution that is sought by this method.

Risk management with navigating that uncertainty in order to avoid succumbing to those risks and the true nature of risk is uncertainty. We are all forced to make tough decisions at one time or another but most of us fail to consider to moral and ethical aspects of these choices.