Analysis Paper Assignmet: Moral Dilemma

Your Task

Describe a situation in your work or personal life, either experienced or witnessed, in which a decision or action of moral gravity was made or taken. You may choose to write this to me or to any audience you specify (advice to a friend, for example). You may write this in the third person or the first person - whichever feels more right to you. This is your story, so you need to tell it in a way that makes sense to you and so that your discussion is clear to your reader. Once you have described the situation, please discuss your answers to the following questions:

· What stakeholders were affected by the decision or action?

· What would have been considered the "right" outcome? What would have been considered "wrong"? Why?

· To what ethical principle or principles was the person (or persons) who made the decision or took the action possibly adhering? Do these match yours today? Why/why not?

· What biases might have prevented the person (or persons) from making the best decision or taking the proper action?

· If there's an organization (company, institution, employer) in the situation, what might that organization have done to prevent and/or remedy the situation and ensure an ethical result?

(I didn't give this assignment a descriptive title because I know you will be able to give it a better one once you've written it)

This time, you aren't writing a memo to a CEO -- you can format the paper however you like. It helps you write better if you picture someone you're writing to, and why, so give that some real thought before jumping in to the assignment. In this assignment, you have a lot of room in terms of your topic -- you should look at the prompts and really think about something you could write well about in terms of what you're being asked. You're being asked to identify a moral dilemma -- somewhere you could have gone one way or another -- or maybe you watched someone make a decision after a moral dilemma presented itself. It doesn't have to be of life-shattering, world-changing proportions -- it could be small. However, whether to have the blueberry muffin or the pumpkin spice muffin isn't a moral dilemma, so you'll need to find something somewhere between nuclear war and muffin selection.