
Ethical Decision Making | 71
Shanks, and Myer (1987) posed the question, What is ethics?, and answered this
question with the following two-part response: “First, ethics refers to well-based
standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in
terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues” (para.
10); and “Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one’s ethical
standards” (para. 11). Regardless of the theoretical definition, common character-
istics regarding ethics are its dialectical, goal-oriented approach to answering
questions that have the potential for multiple acceptable ...