This document discusses factors that shape moral decision-making and making informed decisions. It outlines four major ethical theories - utilitarianism, natural law, deontology, and virtue ethics. It discusses questions of what is the right thing to do and why. Moral questions are ones all humans face. Neither laws nor rules can fully answer these questions. Reason has a role to play in addressing moral questions. Ethics guides interactions with society and environment. Culture, society, and history shape individual identity. Major issues in ethical thought include debates around the relationship between ethics and culture and between ethics and religion.

1. SYNTHESIS:
MAKING
INFORMED
DECISIONS
R O D E L D . B R I O N E S

2. OBJECTIVES
Identify the different factors that
shape an individual in her moral
decision-making.
Internalize the necessary steps
toward making informed moral
decisions.
Apply the ethical theories or
frameworks on moral issues involving
the self, society, and the non-human
environment.

3. Review
What are the
four major
ethical theories
or frameworks?
1
Utilitarianism
2
Natural Law
3
Deontology
4
Virtue ethics
5

4. Let’s focus
What ought I to
do?
What ought I to
do so?
Human condition of
finitude will demand
that we continue to
grapple with these
questions.
The story of humanity
appears to be the
never-ending search
for what it means in
the face of moral
choices.

5. Notions to
be clarified
These questions of what the right thing to do is why are
questions that all human beings-regardless of race, age,
socio-economic class, gender, culture, educational
attainment, religious affiliation or political association-
will have to ask at one point or another in their lives.
Neither the laws nor rules of one’s immediate
community or of wider culture or of religious affiliation
can sufficiently answer these questions, especially when
different duties, cultures, or religions intersect and
conflict.
Reason has a role to play in addressing these
questions, if not in resolving them.

6. Reason

7. What is ethics?
It teaches us that moral
valuation can happen in
the level of the personal,
the societal (both local and
global), and in relation to
the physical environment.
It is clearly concerned with
the right way of acting in
relation to other human
beings and towards self.

8. What is
society?
It refers to one’s immediate community
(neighborhood, barangay, or town) the
larger sphere (province, region, or
country), or the whole global village
defined as the interconnection of the
different nations of the world.
One must be aware that there are many
aspects to social life, all of which may
come into play when one needs to
decide in a moral situation.

9. What is culture?
It includes the beliefs and practices a certain group of people
considered valuable and can extend to such realms as art ( eg,
music, literature, performance, etc.) laws (injunctions against taboo
practices) fields of knowledge (scientific, technological and medical
beliefs and practices) and customs of community.
With these complexities ethics serves as guide through the
potentially confusing thicket of an individual’s interaction with her
wider world of social roles, which can come into conflicts with one
another or even with her own values.

10. Know oneself…who is human
individual?
Who is this individual
who must engage
himself/herself in
ethical thought and
decision-making?
Who one is, in the
most fundamental
sense, is another
major topic in the act
of philosophizing.

11. Famous Greek saying..
Epimeleia he auto-
“Know thyself”

12. Let’s study “Man and
Historical Action” by
Ramon C. Reyes.
He said “who one is” is a
cross-point.
He means that one’s identity,
who one is or who am I, is a
product of many forces and
events that happened outside
one’s choosing.

13. Four Cross-points of individual
PHYSICAL INTERPERSONAL SOCIETAL HISTORICAL

14. Details on 4
cross-points of
individuals
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 oneself.
This happens because one has freedom.
This freedom is not absolute: one does not
become something because one chooses
to be.

15. Major Issues on Ethical Thought
1. Culture and Ethics
• One’s culture dictates what is right or wrong for an individual.
• One culture is inescapable- one must investigate the standards of her
society to resolve all her ethical questions with finality.
• American Philosopher James Rachels (1941-2003) defines cultural
relativism as the position that claims that there is no such thing as
objective truth in the realm of morality.

16. Major Issues on Ethical Thought
A. Culture and Ethics
• Different cultures have different moral codes.
• There cannot be objective truth in morality

17. Major Issues on Ethical Thought
• Cultural differences between one society and another in terms of norms,
practices, and beliefs are not trivial matters that one can disregard.
• They are part of “who one is” and cannot be set aside.

18. Major Issues on Ethical Thought
2. Religion and ethics
• Many people who consider themselves “religious” assume that it is the
teachings of their own religion that define what is truly “right” or “wrong,”
“good” or “bad.”
• Relationship between ethics and religion demands philosophical
exploration.

19. Major Issues on Ethical Thought
2. Religion and ethics
• Religion in essence represents a group’s ultimate most fundamental
concerns regarding their existence.
• For followers of a particular religion, the ultimate meaning of their
existence, as well as the existence of the whole reality, is found in the
beliefs of that religion.