Ethical Decision-Making

Many bad decisions are not made by bad people. They are made by ordinary people who never noticed that a choice had a moral dimension at all. Framed purely as a cost, a deadline, or a target, the ethical question simply never comes up — and by the time it does, the decision is made. The first skill of ethical decision-making is not judgement but recognition: seeing that values are in play.

This lesson stays practical. It is not about which grand moral theory is correct — a separate strand covers moral philosophy. It is about equipping an ordinary decision with a few reliable checks so that when a choice has weight beyond your own interest, you notice, you look wider, and you test it before you act.

Noticing the ethical dimension

A decision has an ethical dimension whenever it can help or harm others, distribute benefits and burdens, involve honesty or deception, or trade someone else's interest for your own. These features hide easily inside operational language. "Optimise the metric," "hit the number," "manage the message" can each carry a moral choice under a neutral surface. Recognition means pausing to ask: who could be affected, and is a value at stake here?

Widening from self-interest to stakeholders

Self-interest is a legitimate input, not the only one. A stakeholder is anyone affected by the decision — customers, colleagues, a community, future users, people with no seat at the table. Listing them, and asking honestly how each is helped or harmed, is the core move. It does not tell you what to do, but it stops you from deciding as if only you existed.

Three simple tests

When a choice has moral weight, three quick checks catch most trouble. The publicity test: would you be comfortable if this decision, and your reasons, were reported on the front page or explained to someone you respect? The reversibility test: would you accept this if you were the person on the receiving end? The harm test: what is the worst harm this could cause, to whom, and is it one you can defend? None is a complete moral theory, but together they surface problems that self-interest hides.

A product manager can quietly ship a change that makes cancelling a subscription harder. It will lift the retention metric. Framed as a number, it looks like a win. Now run the tests. Publicity: would the team be comfortable seeing "company deliberately makes cancelling difficult" reported publicly? Uneasily, no. Reversibility: would they accept this as customers themselves? No. Harm: it takes money from people through friction rather than value. Stakeholders beyond the manager — customers, and the firm's own reputation — are clearly harmed. The metric said yes; the tests say no, and they are right to.

Ethical tests are checks, not a licence to moralise every decision. Choosing a font, a vendor with equivalent terms, or a meeting time carries no real moral weight, and treating it as a grave ethical dilemma wastes attention and irritates everyone. Applied indiscriminately, the tests lose their force. Reserve them for decisions that genuinely help or harm others; the skill is partly knowing when a choice is simply a matter of preference or efficiency, not of values.

The idea of checking a decision against public exposure is long-standing and widely taught. It is often summarised as the "newspaper test" or "front-page test": before acting, imagine your decision, and your reasoning, reported on the front page of a newspaper for your family, colleagues, and community to read — and ask whether you would be comfortable. Warren Buffett gave a well-documented version to Salomon Brothers employees and later before Congress in 1991, telling people to imagine any action being reported by a smart, unfriendly reporter, and adding that he wanted employees to ask themselves whether they would be willing to see it "on the front page of their local paper."

The test is deliberately modest. It does not settle which moral theory is right; it works by removing the privacy in which self-serving reasoning thrives. Related practical frameworks — such as the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics' approach, which weighs multiple lenses including rights, fairness, the common good, and consequences — present several perspectives side by side rather than crowning one. The shared spirit is exposure and multiple viewpoints, not a single doctrine imposed.

• "Ethics is about being a good person, not a skill." The first skill is recognition — noticing the moral dimension before deciding.
• "If it's legal, it's ethical." Law sets a floor; many legal choices still fail the publicity or harm test.
• "Ethical decisions require picking the one true moral theory." Practical tests and multiple lenses can guide a choice without settling deep theory.
• "Considering others means ignoring self-interest." Self-interest is a legitimate input; the point is to weigh it alongside stakeholders, not alone.

You will be given a set of realistic decisions, some with genuine moral weight and some without. For each, decide whether the ethical dimension is real, list who is affected, and run the publicity, reversibility, and harm tests to reach a defensible call.

Think Like a Maester: Before you act, picture your decision and your reasons printed on tomorrow's front page — if that thought makes you flinch, look again.

1. What is the first skill of ethical decision-making, and why does it come before judgement?
2. What features signal that a decision has an ethical dimension?
3. State the publicity, reversibility, and harm tests in your own words.
4. Why is "it's legal" an insufficient standard for an ethical choice?
5. Why does this lesson present several ethical lenses rather than a single moral theory?

Ethical decision-making begins with recognition: noticing that a choice can help or harm others, not just serve a metric or a deadline. From there, widen from self-interest to the full set of stakeholders, asking honestly who is helped and who is harmed. Three simple tests — publicity, reversibility, and harm — catch most trouble without requiring you to settle deep moral philosophy. The publicity or "front-page" test, associated with Warren Buffett's 1991 remarks at Salomon Brothers, works by stripping away the privacy in which self-serving reasoning hides. Applied to decisions that genuinely carry moral weight, these checks turn good intentions into reliable judgement.

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• Sharpening Your Judgment for Life