Ethical Dilemma Analysis: The Principle Based Approach

The Principle Based Approach
Name
Institution
The Principle Based Approach
Ethical decision-making is essential to leadership. Ethical decision-making refers the process of making difficult choices in situations, which involve dilemmas; where there is no one outright right or wrong answer or decision. One of the approaches used in resolving ethical dilemmas in ethics is the principle based approach also known as principalism. This is an emerging school of moral thought that promotes moral values based on various principles such as justice, beneficence, Non-maleficence, and autonomy. The principle of autonomy promotes the free will of individuals while beneficence encourages individuals to focus on doing only that which is good. On the other hand, non-maleficence discourages people from harming others while the principle of justice seeks to promote fairness in terms of social distributions of both burdens and benefits. Therefore, based on this framework, one can make an ethical or moral decision from a wide range of principles that are governed by the four basic principles discussed above. Fr instance, one can make the right decision when faced with a dilemma by relying on principles such as; laws, the U.S. Constitution, Standard Operating Procedures, Societal Values, Governmental rights and Professional Codes of Ethics.
The main ethical dilemma at hand is the question as to whether the government is justified to use drug testing as a prerequisite for offering public assistance. This is one of the issues that have characterized public discussions for a very long time with many people supporting it as much as others who are opposed to it. The main issues coming across in public discourses include the fact that it affects the freed of the people, it denies people their rights to fair treatment by the state and that it is cruel to force individuals to go for drug testing as a prerequisite for offering them health. On the other hand, this issue can also be looked at in terms of the role of the government in providing services to the masses. Therefore, this should be considered from the point of view that the government uses the testing data to make relevant policies that can help people suffering from drugs to become responsible and better citizens. The government has a role to protect citizens from succumbing to negative influences through indulging in drugs. To this effect, there are several laws and policies that the government h...