• Author / Uploaded
• Manuel Mejía Murga

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DILEMA TRAINING. Business ethicists have developed some useful methodologies in their capacities as consultants; Dilema Training is an exemplary one. Among many such models, the one developed by Henk van Luijk, Profesor Emeritus of Business Ethics an Nijenrode University (Holland's equivalent of the Harvard Business School) in an excellent illustration. It has been taught to and implemented successfully by philosophical consultant in the Netherlands and the U.S.A The empirically well-founded premise of dilemma training is that people employed by organizations experience particular kinds of moral conflicts in the workplace, which they are usually ill-prepared to manage or resolve. Examples of these include issues of loyalty to the organization itself, conflicts between private morality and professional ethics (or company policy), choices between complicity or honesty in matters of whitecollar crime, the question of whistle-blowing, and other issues devolving about doing one's job with integrity. Dilemma Training is a seven-step program for identifying, articulating and managing such problems in the workplace itself. Since ethics is not axiomatizable, there is no algorithmic or infallibly prescriptive way to solve moral dilemmas; however, the seven steps of dilemma training allow one at least to understand a problem in a way that lends itself to more effective management. The examined problem is not necessarily the solved one, but the solved problem i rarely the unexamined one. The seven steps are:

1.- Formulate the core issue. What is the moral etichal conflict about? 2.- Identify the actors. Whose rights and claims need to be taken into account? 3.- Gather data. What minimun information is necessary and relevant in this case? 4.- Specify responsibility. Who is accountable? Who has the dilemma? 5.- Elaborate arguments, both pro and con. What reasons support possible resolutions? At this stage, plurality is a virtue. 6.- Attempt a decision. Which arguments are most persuasive, and why? 7.- Justify the decision. Can you live with this? Wolud the same reasoing apply again? What would have to change for your decision to change? While any college instructor or university professor of applied ethics will recognize some of the foregoing steps as typical in pedagogic elaboration of case studies, e.g., in classroom exercises involving business ethics, engineering ethics biomedical ethics, and the like, there is also a conspicuous difference between the classroom and the workplace, akin to the difference between boot-camp and combat. While many students take casework quite seriously, they are also able to set it aside at the end of a period or the completion of an assignment. By contrast, people who experience moral dilemmas in real-life situations are unable to set them aside, or leave them behind, until or unless the find some way to effect an equilibration or harmonization of the problem.

Similarly, the college instructor who competently or even expertly guides his class through an exercise in applied ethical reasoning is not necessarily able to perform the equivalent function outside the groves of academe - where it is often more sorely required. As with all the above- mentioned methodologies the mere acquisition of a tool does not automatically entail expertise in its utilization. The emphasis in the phrase "philosophical practice" is not accidental; effective implementation of the methodology as a practitioner is a matter of training and praxis.

Extracted of Philosophical Practice by Lou Marinoff.