SDP Public Curated Content

SDP Webinar - Dec 2023 - Ethical Decision Quality (EDQ)

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12-31-2023 00:00

SDP Member

Ali Abbas, University of Southern California
December 13, 2023 (SDP Invited Talk)

Abstract: How do you assess the ethical quality of a decision? What are the impediments to ethical decision quality in an organization? Can you integrate ethics into the teaching and practice of decision analysis? Should you integrate decision analysis tools into the teaching and practice of ethics? This talk will address these questions by drawing conclusions and insights from thousands of media articles and case studies.

Decision analysis and ethics have often been treated as different topics. This separation impacts the quality of decisions adopted in situations with ethical implications. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal published articles questioning whether ethics courses are useless and whether business schools can teach students to be virtuous. By drawing on the wealth of tools and experience offered by decision analysts, this talk identifies an area of expansion of decision analysis in organizational ethical decision-making. Further, this talk illustrates the need to integrate ethics into every step of the application of decision analysis.

By integrating ethics into the teaching of decision analysis, the talk also identifies ethical issues that may arise with the application of decision analysis. For example, can the scope of the frame have ethical implications? Can information-gathering or using a flawed method of decision-making have ethical implications? Can cognitive biases be exploited unethically?

This talk (i) introduces the elements of ethical decision quality (EDQ) that can be used to assess the ethical quality of a decision and an organization’s ethical decision culture. By scanning thousands of media articles, the talk also identifies (ii) the descriptive behaviors and mindsets within an organization before an ethical collapse, (iii) the follow-up decisions conducted by organizational administrators in crisis management that further impede ethical decision quality, and (iv) the decisions organizations should make to build their ethical decision.