The Ethical Process: An Approach To Disagreements And Controversial Issues (third edition).

Marvin T. Brown

Upper Saddle river: Prentice Hall, 2003
ISBN 0130988898 (pb), pp.88, £11.99 

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Practical Philosophy  (Book Reviews) Spring 2003 Volume 6.1

Reviewed by: David Arnaud

Ethics begins in disagreement claims Brown. When groups need to make ethical decisions they are confronted by differences. From this, two central claims follow for the philosopher who wants to help the group make wiser decisions. First, people need to engage in dialogue rather than confrontation; they need to value, not fear, their differences as these differences are potential resources for reaching better decisions. Second, they need to uncover their different assumptions and assess their reasons to provide an ethical solution building on the available resources of all.

 

This workbook seeks to provide the means for accomplishing these tasks. The book has a welcome variety of formats. Partly it is traditional writing, albeit illustrated with many diagrams covering key ideas, but it also contains exercises to see if you have grasped various ideas, summaries of important information, brief question and answer and illustrative dialogues, and worksheets to help you use the Ethical Process. All this makes the book engaging and highly practical.

 

Brown has many great techniques members of a group can use to uncover their resources. Two techniques Brown offers are (i) using people’s positions as a way to explain why they select particular information and (ii) exploring the connection between the position and the information they rely on to ascertain the person’s value judgements and assumptions. A masterful further idea for identifying our own assumptions - it’s worth getting the book for this alone and I use this technique now in my searches for both self-knowledge and knowledge of others - is to ask what we would have to assume to agree with someone else’s argument and then, given that we do not actually agree, from this uncover our own assumptions. Once uncovered these assumptions can be investigated and used as resources.

 

I would have liked a case study to show how the Ethical Process all hangs together and some analysis of how well participants are able to use the Ethical Process. Some ideas, for example, constructing syllogisms to uncover implicit values, struck me as too difficult for people to accomplish without quite a bit of training. Anyone who helps groups to make decisions can benefit from ideas in this book. Buy it and make use of it.

 

 

PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY page last updated 01/07/2003 contact webmaster: David Arnaud http://www.practical-philosophy.org.uk