Ethics, law, and the three lenses

Law is the floor, not the ceiling

Ethics is a set of standards for judging whether an act is right or wrong. Law is the subset of those standards a society has chosen to enforce with penalties. Everything legal is not therefore ethical: the law is the floor — the least a society will tolerate — and most of professional life happens in the space above it, where codes of conduct and personal standards do the work. So "it's not illegal" is never a complete answer to "should I?". It rules out the floor and says nothing about the room.

One more distinction the MCQ tests. Descriptive ethics reports how people do behave — a survey finding that 60 % of students have shared answers is descriptive. Normative ethics asks how people should behave. The trap is treating the first as the second: "everyone does it" is a description, not a norm, and a norm cannot be derived from a headcount.

Worked example — the five-star reviews

A Waterloo café owner asks her co-op student, Nadia, to post five glowing reviews of the café under invented names. Nothing in the request is obviously illegal in itself (Canadian competition law does reach fake reviews, but assume Nadia does not know that — she is being asked whether it is right). Run it through the three normative lenses, each of which asks one question:

1. Consequences (the utilitarian lens): what outcome produces the most good, and who is harmed? The café gains a little; every reader who chooses it on a fabricated review is deceived; competitors lose fairly earned custom; and if the reviews are exposed, the café loses more than it gained. The balance is negative once the harmed parties are counted — and the lens's blind spot is exactly that it lets you not count them.
2. Duties (the deontological lens): is there a rule I would want everyone to follow, and does this act break it? "Never deceive people who rely on you" is such a rule. Fake reviews deceive. The act fails regardless of how small the harm turns out to be — which is the lens's strength, and its blind spot is that it can be rigid when two duties collide.
3. Character (the virtue lens): what kind of professional does this act make me? One who fabricates evidence when asked. Nadia is training for a profession whose entire value is that its members' statements can be relied on; the act builds the opposite habit. The blind spot: "character" can become whatever the person doing the act would like to think of themselves.

All three lenses say no. They will not always agree — that is why you run all three — but when they do, the answer is not in doubt, and "it's probably legal" changes nothing.

A second scenario to run yourself

A junior at a small firm notices that a client's spreadsheet double-counts a $12,000 receivable in the client's favour; the partner is on holiday and the statements go out tomorrow. Consequences: who is harmed if it ships (the bank reading the statements), and if it is delayed (the client, mildly)? Duty: never associate with a misleading document. Character: the professional who fixes it before it ships, or the one who noticed and let it go. Run it; the module's later lessons give this scenario its rule number.

Practical wisdom

Codes and lenses do not settle every case. Two duties collide; a consequence is genuinely uncertain. The judgement that decides the particular case, when no rule fully settles it, is what the virtue tradition calls practical wisdom — phronesis. It is built by running cases, which is why this module runs so many. A code is a floor and a set of lenses; it is not an algorithm, and a professional who treats it as one will be right on the easy cases and lost on the hard ones.

A note on names: OpenStax's business text lists four frameworks — justice, utilitarian, duty, and individual rights. This course teaches three lenses and treats justice / fairness (is the outcome distributed fairly?) as a fourth label you may see; the rights framework sits inside the duty lens (a right is a duty owed to someone).