Ethics: A Guiding Light in Human Life

Ethics must be the primary source of reference when it comes to evaluate a situation through acting upon it by making a decision. What’s right and what’s wrong depends on the perception of the person that is derived from the certain values that humans hold. Using your ethical values and the knowledge of them of course, it can be easy to avoid making misleading decisions that can cause problems or misshapes. It is safe to say that looking at situations from an ethical point of view can most definitely lead to making the right choice and that is the case since the knowledge of ethics is unified on a global scale and nearly all aspects of the study of ethics are agreed upon by scholars and law enforcement institutions found all over the globe.

Although ethics is what should primarily control our decisions in life, sometimes there are specific situations or occasions that can alter the ethical guide book. As a human being living on planet earth, there are many possibilities that you can be put in scenarios where it might require you to break some ethical rules. With that being said, an example of that can be the urge to save somebody’s life! Imagine you see a woman in an empty area where there’s no body but the both of you, and to your surprise the woman is suffering from a short breath which is causing her to suffocate slowly.

You notice that there aren’t any adjacent shops or anyone that you can seek help from. But the one thing that you find is a car parked in the spot and you realize that the only chance this woman has to maintain her life is by breaking the law and stealing the car as you can hotwire the engine. Now that’s a tough decision to make if you strictly adhere to the ethical values that you follow, but yet it is the only way you can save this poor lady’s life. This is proof that there is a certain extent to which ethics can be the go to when you are considering making a decision of any kind in whatever situation you’re in.

Sometimes you need to commit a bad deed in order to earn a good one, especially in situations concerning life and death. When you refer to ethics in the example above, the right thing to do would be to avoid stealing the car and wait for professional help to arrive. No phone, no body to ask for help, so what is there left to do other than pray to god that this woman survives if we’re limiting our actions to the teachings of ethics? Therefore, you are left with no other option than stealing the car and taking the lady to the nearest hospital in order to save her life. This means that you have broken the rules of ethics, but only for the sake of saving a woman from her death.