Most people would indeed like to live an ethical life and to make good ethical decisions, but there are several problems. One, we might call the everyday stumbling blocks to ethical behavior. Consider these: My small effort won’t really make a difference. People may think badly of me. It’s hard to know the right thing to do. My pride gets in the way. It may hurt my career. It just went by too quickly. There’s a cost to doing the right thing.
Now, how would you respond if your own children were the ones making these excuses for their behavior? Oh, Mom, what I do won’t really make a difference. Dad, I just didn’t know what to do. Grandma, my friends won’t like me. I won’t get invited to anybody’s home. I know I’ll just never date again.
Put like this, ethics seems easier. But we still confront a practical obstacle–much as anti-smoking public service announcements did years ago. Research showed these ads were tremendously successful in getting people to recognize the addiction and want to kick the habit. The problem was that the ads didn’t teach people how to do it.
The Five Questions: A Systematic Approach
The same is true of ethics. People need a systematic way to approach living an ethical life. Here are five questions that, used daily, can help with the how-to of everyday morality.
Did I practice any virtues today? In The Book of Virtues, William Bennett notes that virtues are “habits of the heart” we learn through models–the loving parent or aunt, the demanding teacher, the respectful manager, the honest shopkeeper. They are the best parts of ourselves.
Ask yourself, Did I cross a line today that gave up one of those parts? Or was I, at least some of the time, a person who showed integrity, trustworthiness, honesty, compassion, or any of the other virtues I was taught as a child?
Did I do more good than harm today? Or did I try to? Consider the short term and long-term consequences of your actions.
Did I treat people with dignity and respect today? All human beings should be treated with dignity simply because they are human. People have moral rights, especially the fundamental right to be treated as free and equal human beings, not as things to be manipulated, controlled, or cast away.
How did my actions today respect the moral rights and the dignified treatment to which every person is entitled?
Was I fair and just today? Did I treat each person the same unless there was some relevant moral reason to treat him or her differently? Justice requires that we be fair in the way we distribute benefits and burdens. Whom did I benefit and whom did I burden? How did I decide?
Was my community better because I was in it? Was I better because I was in my community? Consider your primary community, however you define it–neighborhood, apartment building, family, company, church, etc. Now ask yourself, Was I able to get beyond my own interests to make that community stronger? Was I able to draw on my community’s strengths to help me in my own process of becoming more human?
From Everyday Ethics to Moral Leadership
This everyday ethical reflection must occur before we can effectively confront the larger moral questions. A person who wants to take moral leadership on global issues must, according to author Parker Palmer, “take special responsibility for what’s going on inside his or her own self, inside his or her own consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.”
Palmer goes on to suggest that all of us can be leaders for good; the choice is ours:
We share a responsibility for creating the external world by projecting either a spirit of light or a spirit of shadow on that which is other than us. We project either a spirit of hope or a spirit of despair…. We have a choice about what we are going to project, and in that choice we help create the world that is.
Thomas Shanks, S.J., is executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and is currently working on a book about workplace ethics. This article is taken from Everyday Ethics available at https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/everyday-ethics/, retrieved May 13, 2026
Further Reading
Halberstam, Joshua. Everyday Ethics: Inspired Solutions to Real-Life Dilemmas. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Martin, Mike W. Everyday Morality: An Introduction to Applied Ethics. 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1995.