ABSTRACT
Popular culture has clogged our brains with misconceptions about ethics that obscure its vital role in the workplace and the possibility of making objective ethical judgments. Chapter 2 refutes these false ideas so that we can make progress toward building the ethical skills that our world demands. It first dispenses with the notion that ethics exists to judge our moral worth, a mistake that unnecessarily involves our egos in ethical discussion. Another barrier to rational analysis is the historical association of ethics with religion. The major religions actually have a long tradition of rational analysis in ethics, but in any case, one can carry out ethical reasoning perfectly well without reference to religious belief. This chapter refutes the idea that ethical analysis is pointless because people act according to self-interest, not ethical scruples. This chapter then draws from the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and other developmental psychologists to show that ethical development occurs throughout life, not just in childhood. This chapter concludes by taking on the popular attitude that ethics is just a matter of opinion and not a subject to objective analysis. The rest of this book disproves this idea.
