Ethical Lens Inventory

Your Core Values: Autonomy and Sensibility
You prioritize the value of autonomy over equality. Your primary concern is protecting individual rights. You believe this is the best way to assure that everyone in the community is treated fairly. You prioritize the value of sensibility over rationality. You believe the best results are achieved by examining each situation in its own context rather than applying one-size-fits-all solutions.

Your Classical Values: Prudence
You demonstrate wisdom in practical matters and foresight as you act with enlightened self-interest in a particular situation. You also bring optimism, imagination and the gift of entrepreneurship to the table.

Your Key Phrase: “I make choices that are good for everyone.” Because you value autonomy and sensibility, you tend to assume that each person operates from a clear sense of their own values.

Your Definition of ethical behavior: Creating the Greatest Good You define an ethical person as one who makes responsible choices that benefit many different individuals at the same time. You seek “win-win” results for everyone, even in complex situations.

Your Tools for analyzing problems: Experience
You see the current situation in the light of past experiences and tend to use a combination of intuition and imagination to incorporate new information and solve problems. You focus on what is actually happening and consider solutions that make many people happy. You are able to consider multiple perspectives and are comfortable with ambiguity.

Your Gift: Free Will
Because you value autonomy, you are self-reliant and accountable, and you work to assure that others can be as well. You are not afraid to pursue what delights you and brings you pleasure, both in the short term and the long-term. You want this freedom for each person to seek their ideal goals in life.

Your Blind spot: Satisfied with too little good
Sometimes you fail to be accountable to those who are depending on you when you exercise your free will. So long as you’ve satisfied your own needs, you can become complacent, leaving problems unresolved in the long-term and everyone else to fend for themselves.

Your Risk: Reducing decisions to a cost-benefit analysis
If you do not assure that all have free will, you run the risk of reducing decisions to a narrow and purely financial cost-benefit analysis. You tend to cut corners as you become attached to achieving your own goals.

Your Temptation: Expedience
If you are not paying attention, you can be tempted to expedience: basing your actions on what is politic or advantageous rather than what is right or just. You will convince yourself that everyone will be happy in the end and not mind a few insignificant corners being cut.

Your Vice: Becoming Greedy
If you fail to exercise free will responsibly, your healthy pursuit of good for all can devolve into an excuse for taking as much for yourself as you can get away with. A desire to consume more than you need (gluttony), and craving for pleasures of the body(lust) can become problems for people who prefer this lens.

Your Crisis: Failure
Unless you develop the practice of mindfulness and reflection, at some point you will face failure. No one can accomplish or acquire everything and the more you do, the less satisfying it becomes. If you find you have few friends, it could be because your acquisitiveness drives them away.

Your Seeing Clearly: Use your head
To see more clearly, check to see whether your gut and your head agree. To find balance, explore the gifts of the other lenses – consistency and concern for the whole community. As you consider what will provide the greatest good, temper your actions with consideration of the needs of the whole community and a consistent approach to similar situations. As you learn to consider other perspectives in your decision making process, you will live out the best of your ideals with compassion and care for others.
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