In a quandary about ethical decisions

Decisions regarding personal choices which people are faced with in everyday life can sometimes lead to surprising dilemmas

By Lina Giannarou - Kathimerini

Have you ever thought how many dilemmas we are faced with every day? Even in one visit to the supermarket, the choices we have to make are countless: Should I buy the cheaper one or the more expensive one? The organic or the conventional one? A local or imported product? The questions multiply. This myriad of petty and more serious decisions, though we might be unaware of it, actually reflects to a certain degree our stance toward life and how ethical we are.

In modern society the dividing line between what is right and what is wrong, the ethical and unethical, is indeed rather blurred, and to spare ourselves any fretting we tend to make decisions on the basis of whether something is in our interest or not. For example, when buying a manufactured product, does it occur to us that it is cheap because it was probably produced with child labor in some developing country? How many of us, when purchasing a pirate CD from a friendly immigrant/street seller, realize that in doing so we are depriving the artist of an income? What then is our reasoning when getting home help or buying a holiday home?

These issues abound when looking at different areas of public life: Can journalists pass judgment on a person’s guilt? Should politicians keep their private lives secret or project them as a model through the media? Is it ethical to produce programs on human suffering? And as the Church is rather topical at the moment, should it be more secular or more spiritual?

Kathimerini presented a number of dilemmas to the experts and asked them their opinions.