Ethical/Moral

Reflection
 What is Ethical Reflection
• In making moral decision one must have the capacity to look upon
oneself and ponder on the possible consequences of an action. This
requires the nurturance of an attitude of a detached observer almost
akin to a scientist probing a specimen through the microscope. Thus,
the required tools of ethical reflection are right attitude in relation to
one's self-scrutiny and its corresponding intersubjectivity; and moral
reasoning.
 The Role of Moral Agent
• The act of moral agent
The moral act is the source of decision, an act that modify and
changes the world. It is through the moral agent that the world unfold
and its meaning.
It is only through the moral that ethics is possible
 Nature of Ethical Reflection
• Ethical reflection is not principally concerned with scrutiny of one’s
moral status or self-image. It is not the same thing as moral self-
examination. The primary concern in moral reflection is not moral
self-analysis. Its most important questions are not about oneself
(‘What kind of moral person am I?’ ‘How good am I?’). The most
important questions in moral reflection are about one’s experiences
in all of their particularity and what, morally, they might mean (‘What
happened here?’ ‘What have I done?’).
• The primary concern for moral reflection is one’s own moral
experience and one’s response or lack of response, one’s action or
lack of action. Self-image may partially inform this experience, but
reflection on moral experience is not reflection on self-image.
• Moral reflection primarily concerns itself with experience and moral
response – moral agency – not moral status
 The critical nature of moral reflection
• Moral reflection is an actively sceptical morally self-conscious state. It
is sceptical firstly in the sense that it proceeds from a position of
doubt about the reliability of one’s lower-order moral responses or
lack of moral response (E.g., taking a quiet moment to reflect on the
moral features of the situation).
• To morally reflect, we must be prepared to dissent from our existing
first-order moral response if examination of the experience finds us in
the wrong or mistaken. That is, moral reflection requires of us that we
are first of all willing to genuinely question – not just review and re-
endorse – the moral features of our part in the dispute.
• It should be clear that moral reflection is not simply a state of doubting the
reliability of lower-order moral responses. Moral reflection, being a critical
examination, is interrogative about one’s moral experience. It is not the act of
inducing doubt about one’s past moral experience or simply of identifying
moral responses about which one has latent doubts. Moral reflection is the
act of seeking out explicit and tacit moral responses and judgements in the
particular experiences it examines and – if clear responses are discovered – of
questioning from a moral point of view what those moral responses and
judgements were.
 Social Dimension of moral reflection
• While moral reflection seems to be taken as a private matter,
wherein, a moral agent is reflecting on his/her expereinces, that said
experiences have social implication. This is because as moral agent we
are inevitably belongs to society, where people interacts, and as a
result actions of individuals have the specific moral implications.
Moral reflection and Genuine commitment and
action
• When we say moral commitment this means that someone with a genuine
commitment is actually disposed to act in the light of that commitment,
rather than, for example, merely desiring that its end be advanced, or being
disposed to avow a commitment to it.
• For example: A person who evinces ‘a commitment to world peace’ but whose
cynicism causes despair of ever being able to do anything about it. The cynic
will not even engage in merely symbolic action for the cause of world peace,
seeing this type of action as self-indulgent and self-serving. This person has a
desire for or is favourably disposed towards world peace, but does not have a
genuine commitment to it, since they do not actually do anything about it.
• A person does not come to have a commitment by merely desiring a
thing, or judging a thing desirable; nor by merely announcing their
commitment, either to themselves or to others. A person comes,
genuinely, to have a commitment when they are actually disposed to
act upon it – disposed to act upon it in the actual course of their life
and not merely in a hypothetical situation they will never face.
• Thus, a moral agent must be sincere and resolute in making moral
decisions, for this has a huge impact, not only to his/her own
community but to world itself.
 Summary

"The unexamined life is not worth living"

--Socrates (in Plato's Apology)

“What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to

think what we are doing.”
—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.