My Book of Ethics

In the book, ethics is defined as a “rational process founded on certain agreed-on principles” (pg. 3). After reading the first chapter, An Introduction to Ethical Decision Making, I realize that there are tons of ethical decisions that are made daily. Now the field that I plan on entering is Production, and in that field you can be faced with some tough ethical decisions. Of course it all depends on the situation. An example of a scenario where ethics comes to play with production would be like Scenario #2 (page 1). That is the video of the high-school fight that was released on Youtube. Personally, I would not have aired the footage; the video is irrelevant to the story and may stir up trouble. I assume that this happens all the time in the news but off the top of my head I cannot really think of one particular incident.

The tools that I have built in for ethics is my faith, and the Golden Rule in the Bible is “Do unto others as you would have others do to you. “ This is my first rule in any type of ethical situation, I often think about how this would affect the other party and then myself. The same with film, you have to put yourself in the other person’s shoes before you can start writing, filming, or reporting anything about the person. With that being said and after reading the first chapter I learned that my views are somewhat similar to Immanuel Kant’s. On page 9 it says that his categorical imperative is stated in two ways “first is that an individual should act as if the choices the one makes for oneself could become universal law. And second that you should act so that you treat each individual as an end and never as merely a means.” After reading this I realized that Kant’s first “manifestation” and the Golden Rule in the Bible are quite similar in their focus on duty (pg10).

When it comes to learning though, I would like to discuss ethical situations that would happen within production. The only ethical decisions I can really come up with, is how you expose people or organizations in media, or what you expose in a documentary. I am sure there is more and that is what I am here for.