Moral Sensitivity: A Case Study

From my perspective, the most critical of the four elements of ethical action according to psychologist James Rest is “Moral Sensitivity”. According to the text, “we can’t solve a moral dilemma unless we know that one is present” (Johnson, 2012, p.86), this is so true in that ethical issues often get over-looked and go unnoticed habitually. This may be caused by compliancy, lack of attention and understanding, or due to fear or hesitation. At times recognition of ethical dilemmas may be obvious; it is when they are not that a predicament can occur, as what happened to the Nestle Company. I believe if we can identify the source of “moral intensity’s” before they become apparent, we can avoid dilemmas from developing or at the least mitigate the situation from amplifying. By exercising moral imagination and limiting moral muteness we can recognize and bring to light the ethical issue at hand and avoid or limit the issue from originating. So for me, …show more content…
Performing a maintenance task on one of our aircraft, we notice a very clear and visible scratch down to the bare metal. This type of scratch must be reported and should have been as soon as it happened, in order to prevent costly corrosion. It was no doubt a member of our shops who caused the damage but failed to report it. We brought it up to our Lead Petty Officer knowing it was the right thing to do, only to be met with a simple shoulder shrug and the comment of “why would we tell on our own shop, we will let someone else find it”. If left unsaid the fall could come down on the entire shop or us. Knowing this was not the appropriate way of correcting the situation, we discussed if we should override his command by letting our Chief know. In which we did, resulting in disciplinary action towards our LPO only. We could not let this stand and have it poison our shop by setting a standard of performing improper and poor quality