Instilling Beauty, Not Fear

As a student in college, I am at a point in my life where making the “right” decisions has become all the more imperative the closer I move to graduation. Everyday, college students face a variety of decisions to make including what to eat, whether to go to class or not, or what to major in. For the first time in our lives, we are asked to come up with answers to questions that we have little to no understanding of. The world is our oyster and yet, we have no idea where to cast our nets. If you are like me at all, you, too, have struggled determining what the best decisions are to make in these new situations. Truly, the answer to what is right is not always as clear as we would like for it to be. In fact, it can be quite foggy at times, which is why we must educate ourselves. So for the next few weeks, my classmates and I will be exploring the question, “How do we decide what is right or wrong?,” through the lens of normative ethics. Here, I will share what I feel is the most sensible classic position to take, along with what I most frequently employ when making ethical decisions.

By definition, normative ethics are those principles that help us “arrive at moral standards that regulate right and wrong conduct” (Normative Ethics). As found in this week’s readings, there are three primary strategies that we will be looking at throughout this semester: virtue ethics, duty-based ethics, and consequentialist ethics. While duty-based ethics focuses more on obeying a set of laws and consequentialist ethics is used to determine if you or someone else will benefit from the decision, virtue ethics appears to be most wholesome and sensible to me. Instead of stressing a bunch of rules to follow, virtue ethics “places less emphasis on learning rules, and instead stresses the importance of developing good habits of character,” which I believe is the foundation for instilling good decision making in people (Normative Ethics). Surely, you can teach someone to follow the law and have that be their guidebook for choosing what is right versus what is wrong, but at the end of the day, they are following those rules because they have to, not because it is what they want to do. That is why I think virtue ethics is the most sensible classic category, because it deals with how people position their heart and not how good they are at following the rules.

Furthermore, when it comes to my own decision-making, I most frequently use virtue ethics to help me determine the most ethical decision. A lot of that has to do with my Christian upbringing and the “moral education” I received growing up from both my family and the church. I was blessed to grow up in a home where my family was committed to instilling virtuous character traits in me at a young age. Although attending Vacation Bible School was not my decision to make, I am so thankful that my parents introduced me to the teachings of Christ at a young age, because that has impacted how I manage my actions, emotions, and relationships with others today. Truly, it is virtue ethics that makes the most sense to me in terms of answering the question what is right versus wrong. If we want to strive for a morally good world, we must do so by instilling beautiful traits in the young, instead of confining them to a bunch of laws they must follow.