Systems for Decision Making
I was reading an article in Scientific American. It developed ideas about a biological question. It was attempting to decide if the decisions were ethical or moral. But it was applying an economic model to test and measure.
Is it ethical or moral to stop the spraying of mosquitoes in your yard when that will encourage more mosquitoes in the neighbor’s yard and stop him from having an outdoor barbecue. Is it ethical? If those sprays also kill all the pollinating insects and thereby destroy all pollinated crops that make up about 25% of all our food crops, so more people in other countries starve. Is it ethical?
Is it moral to have a third baby when that more than reproduces the family thereby increasing population in the first world? We know that the first world consumes four times what the third world people consume, so one extra birth here means four must starve in the third world. Morality is the question of breaking a societal custom. Ethics are rules of absolute good and bad, considering that many religions define good and bad in different ways, but communities without religion work on self development, and fair distribution of goods and services and the principle of cooperation, which means we have to be certain of our definitions. Morality is subjective and ethics are objective. But they require much more knowledge and wisdom.
We had to receive much management training in the government. Several times they retrained the whole department. They wanted to have government follow a business model. After the training was over we were to follow their problem solving methods.