ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of different sorts of ethical thinking. Schools and colleges are complex organisations. They have similar powers and duties to other bodies which employ people, and work with the vulnerable. Ethicists use different approaches to judge right and wrong. Understanding them is central to structured ethical thought and sensible action. The chapter considers four approaches: rights; duties; virtues and cases. A rights-based approach to ethics tries explicitly to codify areas of life that need protection. Rights are the easy part of ethical leadership. They are enshrined in law and pretty simple to institutionalise in schools. Duties are closer to the heart and start to encroach upon the motivations school leaders have for their actions. Virtues are the personal characteristics of the leader that inform right judgement and decision-making. The development of law is simultaneously clear and hidden, written and unwritten, immutable and changeable where previous decisions bind similar future cases.
