V A L U E S:Values are defined as elements of desirability, worth, or importance.
Values are defi ned as elements of desirability, worth, or importance. You may say that you value honesty; another way of saying that is that one of your values is honesty. Others may value physical health, friendships, material success, or family. Individual values form value systems. All people prioritize certain things that they consider important in life. Val- ues only become clear when there is a choice to be made; for instance, when you must choose between friendship and honesty, or material success and family. Behavior is gener- ally consistent with values. For instance, some individuals believe that fi nancial success is more important than family or health. In this case, we may assume that their behavior will refl ect the importance of that value and that these persons will be workaholics, spending more time at work than with family and endangering their health with long hours, stress, and lack of exercise. Others place a higher priority on religious faith, wisdom, honesty, and/or independence than fi nancial success or status.
Values as judgments of worth are often equated with moral judgments of goodness. We see that both can be distinguished from factual judgments, which can be empirically verifi ed. Note the difference between these factual judgments:
“He is lying.” • “It is raining.” •
duties Required behaviors or actions, i.e., the responsibilities that are attached to a specifi c role.
superogatories Actions that are commendable but not required in order for a person to be considered moral.
imperfect duties Moral duties that are not fully explicated or detailed.
values Judgments of desirability, worth, or importance.
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and these value judgments:
“She is a good woman.” • “That was a wonderful day.” •
The last two judgments are more similar to moral judgments, such as “Lying is wrong” or “Giving to charities is good.” Facts are capable of scientifi c proof, but values and moral judgments are not.
Some writers think that value judgments and moral judgments are indistinguishable because neither can be verifi ed. Some also think that values and morals are relativistic and individual. In this view, there are no universal values; values are all subjective and merely opinions. Because they are only opinions, no value is more important than any other value (Mackie, 1977: 22–24).
In contrast, others believe that not all values are equal, and that some values, such as honesty, are always more important than other values, such as pleasure. In this view, values such as charity, altruism, integrity, knowledge, and responsibility are more impor- tant or better than the values of pleasure or wealth. You may value personal pleasure over charity or honesty, but to someone who believes in universal values, you would be wrong in this view. This question is related to a later discussion in Chapter 2 concerning whether ethics are relative or absolute.
As stated earlier, values imply a choice or a judgment. If, for instance, you were con- fronted with an opportunity to cheat on an exam, your values of success and honesty would be directly at odds. Values and morals are similar, although values indicate the rela- tive importance of these constructs, whereas morals prescribe or proscribe behavior. The value of honesty is conceptually distinct from the moral rule against lying.
Messner and Rosenfeld’s (1994) theory of crime utilizes the concept of values. In their explanation of why the United States has a higher rate of violent crime than other Western countries, they propose that the U.S. value system, which emphasizes consumerism over family and fi nancial success over honesty, creates an environment in which crime results. In the United States, success is defi ned almost exclusively by the accumulation of material goods, not by doing good. Because behavior is infl uenced by one’s value system, indi- viduals who place material success over any other value will behave dishonestly or even violently in the pursuit of such goods.
An explicit value system is part of every ethical system, as we will see in Chapter 2. The values of life, respect for the person, and survival can be found in all ethical systems. Certain values hold special relevance to the criminal justice system and those profession- als who work within it; privacy, freedom, public order, justice, duty, and loyalty are all values that will come up again in later discussions.
Making Moral Judgments We make moral or ethical judgments all the time: “Abortion is wrong.” “Capital punish- ment is just.” “It’s good to give to charity.” “It’s wrong to hit your spouse.” These are all judgments of good and bad behavior. We also make choices, knowing that they can be judged as right or wrong. Should you call in sick to your boss, even though you aren’t sick, to get a day in the sun? Should you give back extra change that a clerk gave you by mistake? Should you tell a friend that her husband is having an affair even though he asked you not to tell? Should you cut and paste sections of Wikipedia into your term paper?
Not all behaviors involve questions of ethics. To draw the boundaries of our ethical discussion more specifi cally, we need to know which behavioral decisions might be judged
10 P A R T I | Ethics and the Criminal Justice System
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C H A P T E R 1 | Morality, Ethics, and Human Behavior 11
under ethical standards. Decisions that can be judged involve four elements: (1) acts that are (2) human and (3) of free will (4) that affect others.
ACT First of all, some act must be present to judge. For instance, we are concerned with the act of stealing or the act of contributing to charity, rather than an idle thought that stealing a lot of money would enable us to buy a sailboat or a vague intention to be more generous. We are not necessarily concerned with how people feel or what they think about a particular action unless it has some bearing on what they do. The intention or motive behind a behavior is an important component of that behavior. For instance, in ethical formalism (which we will discuss in Chapter 2), one must know the intent of an action to be able to judge it as moral or immoral, but one also must have some action to examine before making a moral judgment.
ONLY HUMAN ACTS Second, judgments of moral or ethical behavior are directed spe- cifi cally to human behavior. A dog that bites is not considered immoral or evil, although we may criticize pet owners who allow their dogs the opportunity to bite. Nor do we con- sider drought, famine, fl oods, or other natural disasters immoral even though they result in death, destruction, and misery. The devastating earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 is not considered immoral; although individuals who could have helped victims and did not might be. Philosophers widely believe that only humans can be moral (or immoral) be- cause of our capacity to reason. Because only humans have the capacity to be good— which involves a voluntary, rational decision and subsequent action—only humans, of all members of the animal kingdom, have the capacity to be bad.
There is much more to this argument, of course, and there are those who argue that some mammals show moral traits, if not moral sensibilities. Shermer (2004: 27–28), for instance, recognizes a pre-moral sense in animals, including shame or guilt in dogs, food sharing in bats, comforting and cooperative behaviors in chimpanzees, life-saving behaviors in dolphins and elephants, and defending behaviors in whales. Mammals, especially apes, monkeys, dol- phins, and whales, exhibit attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, confl ict resolu- tion and peacemaking, deception and deception detection, community concern and caring about what others think, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group.
Does this mean, then, that these mammals can be considered moral or immoral? Al- though they may be placed on the continuum of moral awareness closer to humans than other species, one could also argue that they do not possess the moral rationality of hu- mans. They do not, as far as we know, freely choose to be good or bad, nor do they judge their fellow animals as right or wrong.
FREE WILL In addition to limiting discussions of morality to human behavior, we usu- ally further restrict our discussion to behavior that stems from free will and free action. Moral culpability is not assigned to persons who are not suffi ciently aware of the world around them to be able to decide rationally what is good or bad. The two groups tradition- ally exempt from responsibility in this sense are the young and the insane, similarly to what occurs when ascribing legal culpability.
Arguably, we do not judge the morality of their behavior because we do not believe that they have the capacity to reason and, therefore, cannot choose to be moral or immoral. Although we may punish a 2-year-old for hitting a baby, we do so to educate or socialize, not to punish, as we would an older child or adult. We incapacitate the violent mentally ill to protect ourselves, but we consider them sick, not evil. This is true even if their actual behavior is indistinguishable from that of other individuals we do punish. For example,
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12 P A R T I | Ethics and the Criminal Justice System
a murder may result in a death sentence or a hospital commitment, depending on whether the person is judged to be sane or insane, responsible or not responsible.
AFFECTS OTHERS Finally, we usually discuss moral or immoral behavior only in cases in which the behavior signifi cantly affects others. For instance, throwing a rock off a bridge would be neither good nor bad unless you could possibly hit or were aiming at a person below. If no one is there, your behavior is neutral. If someone is below, however, you might endanger that person’s life, so your behavior is judged as bad.
All the moral dilemmas we will discuss in this book involve at least two parties, and the decision to be made affects at least one other individual in every case. In reality, it is diffi cult to think of an action that does not affect others, however indirectly. Even self-destructive behavior is said to harm the people who love us and who would be hurt by such actions.
We sense that these elements are important in judging morality when we hear the common rationale of those who, when judged as doing something wrong, protest, “But nobody was hurt!” or “I didn’t mean to.” Indeed, even a hermit living alone on a desert island may engage in immoral or unethical actions. Whether he wants to be or not, the hermit is part of human society; therefore, some people would say that even he might engage in actions that could be judged immoral if they degrade or threaten the future of humankind, such as committing suicide or polluting the ocean.
One’s actions toward nature also might be defi ned as immoral, so relevant actions include not only actions done to people but also to animals and to the environment. To abuse or exploit animals can be defi ned as immoral. Judgments can be made against cock- fi ghting, dog racing, laboratory experimentation on animals, and hunting. The growing area of environmental ethics refl ects increasing concern for the future of the planet. The rationale for environmental ethics may be that any actions that harm the environment affect all humans. It also might be justifi ed by the belief that humankind is a part of nature— not superior to it—and part of natural law should be to protect, not exploit, our world.
Thus far, we know that morality and ethics concern the judgment of behavior as right or wrong. Furthermore, such judgments are directed only at voluntary human behavior that affects other people, the earth, and living things. We can further restrict our inquiries regarding ethics to those behavioral decisions that are relevant to one’s profession in the criminal justice system. Discussions regarding the ethics of police offi cers, for instance, would concern issues such as the following:
Whether to take gratuities • Whether to cover up the wrongdoing of a fellow offi cer • Whether to sleep on duty •
Discussions regarding the ethics of defense attorneys might include the following:
Whether to devote more effort to private cases than appointed cases • Whether to allow perjury • Whether to attack the character of a victim in order to defend a client •
Of course, all of these actions affect other people, as do most actions taken as a profes- sional. Most behaviors that might be judged as ethical or not for criminal justice profes- sionals fall into four major categories:
Acts involving citizens/clients (i.e., misuses of authority, harassment, malfeasance or • misfeasance) Acts involving other employees (i.e., harassment, gossip, lying) •
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