Ethical perspectives and frameworks

¶ … ethical stance? Why? How do you carry it out?

In general, my ethical stance is that every person has the same rights and that the limits of rights are usually dictated by where their enjoyment conflicts or interferes with the rights of others. In many ways, I subscribe to the ideas outlined by John Stuart Mill in his epic on Liberty. I try to live up to those ideas by remembering that everyone has the right to believe and express any belief, regardless of whether or not I respect those particular beliefs. I carry out my ethical stance by maintaining an objective perspective of situations and by remembering to imagine myself in the opposite position in any conflict to try to identify what my position would be if the situation were reversed. This concept is equally applicable to the personal and professional realms.

Article Summary

In his recent article, David Horsey of the Los Angeles Times reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid squandered the opportunity to advance democracy by following through on his long series of repeated promises to reduce the opportunity for Senate filibuster abuse by bringing to the Senate floor a proposal to reinstitute the traditional rule requiring filibustering senators to actually militate for their positions during the filibuster process. Reid had championed that position for more than year but when the opportunity came to do so on the only possible day that Senate rules can be changed by a majority vote in any Senate term, Reid reneged on his promise. The issue appears to raise an ethical dilemma because it seems that the only two conceivable explanations are equally unethical. Moreover, Horsey's report fails to address the second of those possible explanations and only hints at the first, as though the author were afraid to articulate late it directly.

Article Critique

Specifically, the first possible explanation for Reid's stunning reversal is simply that he fears losing the ability to filibuster Republican legislation in the event of a future republican majority in the Senate more than he cares about restoring functionality to the bicameral U.S. Congress. His reasoning would be that if the republicans gain control of the Senate in the upcoming mid-term Congressional elections, a Democratic minority would need to be able to block Republican legislation by filibustering to force a two-thirds supermajority voting threshold, exactly as the Republicans have been doing since the 2010 mid-term elections. At the very least, this is hypocrisy and forsaking the best possible governmental function for partisan loyalty to a political party over country. Horsey does allude to this, although so subtly that one could miss it altogether.