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Incorporating Ethics Into Daily Practice

Translating Values into Action ​

  • This website is dedicated to helping people make more ethically justified decisions—and thereby live better, more integrated lives
  • How we approach and make decisions is directly tied to how we understand our relationships to one other and what life is all about.
  • Making choices well involves thinking critically and systematically and treating those involved with respect through the process.
  • Living with integrity describes the interpretive exercise of understanding and negotiating the systems of values and beliefs that we encounter every day.
What is ethics?

My name is Bashir Jiwani.

I am an Ethicist and Director of Ethics Services and Diversity Services for Fraser Health, a large regional health authority in Southern British Columbia, Canada. I spend a lot of time helping individuals, teams, and organizations think through difficult choices.

Through my study and work with a variety of academic, professional, and civil society organizations, and with the help of many, many people, I have been involved in the creation of a number of decision-support tools. (While I work in health care, I believe the thinking behind the tools and the tools themselves can be helpful in a variety of contexts.)

This website is a vehicle for providing access to these tools broadly. My hope is that this will also become a place where the use of these resources can be discussed. I further hope this will lead to improvement in the tools and, more importantly, make a small contribution to our collective thinking about how we should tackle the issues we face every day.

We have made these tools available in various formats and for use either by individuals or by teams of people. You can download them in full or you can download separate sections. For some of the tools we have also set up each step as its own web page for you to review online. Some of these tools are also still being developed, so you will find some pages changing as construction continues.

To read more about the approach, click here.

I hope you will find the website useful and thought-stimulating. And, if you do, I would be delighted to hear how!

Thanks for visiting,
Bashir

  • Diversity is a fact in today’s world. In all parts of contemporary life we live with, work alongside and serve people who are different from ourselves. Making ethically justified decisions requires working well in this context.
  • Crucial to responding effectively is the value of pluralism – seeing difference as a strength and working to respond to challenges in collaboration with others so we can find common solutions to shared problems in a way that doesn’t require us to compromise what is essential to us.
  • We are thinking through what this means practically. We do know that this pluralism requires understanding and skill.
  • The websites below are resources that share thinking on both of these areas.

Resources/links:

  • Within these resources, I have attempted to convert the basic ideas of my approach to decision-making (outlined here) into specific process steps that individuals and teams can follow to make decisions. The steps vary depending on whether we are making decisions in individual situations or decisions that impact groups.
  • What follows is a very high level summary of the steps for both individual and group (or system-level) decisions.
  • Talk about virtue, practical judgement and thinking it through?

Resources/links: