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Lesson 4: Ethical Decision Making II
Non-Western approaches to ethical decision-making commonly incorporate moral values based on custom and tradition, not Enlightenment ideas. As HR professionals, we should be sensitive to differences in moral frameworks, reflecting diverse social, cultural, religious, and country contexts. However, this does not mean that we should subscribe to moral relativism, or the position that the truth of all moral judgments is contingent upon the society or culture one belongs to, so that cross-cultural ethical disagreement proves impossible. On the other, hand, moral absolutism, or the position that a set of universal moral truths exists, is similarly troublesome, since it rules out any sensitivity to diverse moral frameworks. For instance, the Confucian belief that it is morally obligatory to care for one’s elderly parents is true in certain cultural contexts. However, there are some moral beliefs (e.g., that lying, stealing, and murder are wrong) that cross all contexts and so resemble universal moral truths. Therefore, taking a position somewhere between the extremes of relativism and absolutism is usually the best approach in appreciating non-Western approaches to ethical decision-making.