GROUP 6

SYNTHESIS:
MAKING INFORMED
DECISIONS
Prepared By:
Mae-Ann R. Sarol
BSED ENGLISH 1
 Chapter Objectives

✘ Identify the different factors that shape an individual

in her moral decision-making;

✘ Internalize the necessary steps toward making

informed moral decisions; and

✘ Apply the ethical theories or frameworks on moral

issues involving the self, society, and the non-human
environment
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 INTRODUCTION

ETHICS

Physical
Personal Societal Environme
{both local
local and
and global}
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 INTRODUCTION
We have been introduced to four major ethical theories
or frameworks ; utilitarianism, natural law ethics, Kantian
deontology, and virtue ethics. None of them is definitive nor
final.

 “ What ought I do?”

 “Why ought I to do so?”

The story of human appears to be never ending search for

what it means to be fully human in the face of moral choices.

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INTRODUCTION

✘ Personal can be understood to

mean both the person in relation to
herself, as well as her relation other
human beings on an intimate or
person-to-person basis.

✘ It also refers to a person’s intimate

relationships with other people like
her parents, siblings, children,
friends, or other close
acquaintances.

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 INTRODUCTION

 Society, in this  All levels of society  Ethics serves to guide one

context means one’s involve some kind through the potentially
immediate of culture, which confusing thicket of an
community, the may be loosely individual’s interaction
larger sphere or the described as the with her wider world of
whole global way of life of a social roles, which can
village defined as particular come into conflict with
the interconnection community of one another or even with
of the different people at a given her own system of values.
nations of the period of time.
world.

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INTRODUCTION
The latter part of the
twentieth century gave
birth to an awareness
among many people that
“community” does not only
refer to the human
groups that one belongs
to, but also refers to the
non-human natural world
that serves as home and
source of nurturance for
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all beings.

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The Moral Agent
and Contexts
 The Moral Agent and Contexts

✘ The human individual is tasked to think about what is “right”

and why is it so and to choose to so. Who is this individual
who must engage herself in ethical thought and decision
making?

✘ In response to this age-old philosophical challenge, the

Filipino philosopher Ramon C. Reyes (1935-2014), writing
in his essay “Man and Historical Action,” briefly explained
that “who one is” is a cross-point.

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Reyes means that one’s identity, who one is, is a product of many forces and
events that happened outside of one’s choice. He identifies four cross-
points:

PHYSICAL INTERPERSONAL SOCIETAL HISTORICAL

- You are a - One did not choose - “who one is” is - The events
member of the her own parents, and yet shaped by one’s that one’s
species Homo her personality, society. The term people has
Sapiens and character traits and her “society” here pertains undergone. In
therefore possess overall way of doing to all the elements of short, one’s
the capacities and things and thinking about the human groups – people’s
limitations things have all been as supposed to the history shapes
endemic to shaped by the character natural environment – “who one is”
human of her parents and how that one is a member right now.
everywhere. they brought her up. of culture.

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 The Moral agent and Contexts

✘ However, being a product of all these cross-points is just one

side of “who one is”. According to Reyes, “who one is” is also a
project for one’s self. This happens because a human individual
has freedom. This freedom is not absolute; one does not become
something because one chooses to be.

✘ Thus, for Reyes, “who one is” is a cross-point, but in an

existential level, he argues that the meaning of one’s existence is
in the intersection between the fact that one’s being is a product
of many forces outside her choosing and her ideal future for
herself.

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 -END-
Thank you for listening!

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