Application of ethical principles: print media essay

Two sentences, two verbs, and they are not worth the same. *Write a summary of the ethical situation* establishes the facts; *identify, with explanation, the ethical principles the situation presents* is where the marks sit. The distinction turns on that phrase **with explanation**. Naming a principle is identification — “this raises a question of justice” — and it takes one clause. Explanation means showing which specific fact in your situation engages that principle and how: who was owed what, by whom, and what about their conduct makes the principle relevant rather than decorative. Most papers spend three quarters of their length retelling the news story and then attach principle labels in a closing paragraph. Invert that. The summary should be the shortest section that still gives a reader every fact the analysis later uses, and nothing it does not.

The source rule is a graded requirement rather than administrative trim. Newspapers, journals and magazines are permitted, online newspapers and journals are explicitly permitted, and blogs are explicitly not. The line being drawn is editorial process, not delivery format: a piece that passed through an assigning editor, a named reporter and a corrections policy is reporting, and a piece that did not is commentary however professional it looks. Check for a byline, a dateline, a masthead and a published corrections page before committing to a story, because discovering at the drafting stage that your source is an aggregator or a contributor page costs you the paper. Watch the grey case too: an opinion column in a real newspaper is print media and is still argument rather than reporting, so use it for context and take the facts from the news pages.

*It does not have to be in healthcare* is an invitation most students decline, and declining it is usually the weaker choice. The four principles taught in ethics courses — respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice — were formulated for medicine, so applying them inside medicine lets you assume they fit. Applying them to a product recall, a data breach or a sentencing decision forces you to argue that they fit, and that argument is analysis a marker can reward. Gillon's addition to the four is the tool for it: **scope**. Whose autonomy, exactly? Beneficence owed to whom, and by whom? A principle with no stated scope is a slogan, and naming the scope is what stops a non-healthcare paper reading as though four medical concepts had been dropped onto an unrelated story.

The brief says *one ethical situation*, and the singular is doing real work. A corporate scandal that ran for eighteen months contains dozens of decisions by dozens of actors, and a paper trying to hold all of them summarises none. Choose a bounded episode: identifiable people, a decision point, and a consequence you can state in a sentence. Then be honest about what kind of episode it is. A situation in which someone simply behaved badly is an ethical **violation**, which is perfectly acceptable material — but it is not a dilemma, and calling it one invites the marker to look for a second defensible option you never supplied. A dilemma needs two courses of action a reasonable person could defend, with a principle on each side. Say plainly which of the two you have.

Keep the levels of ethical vocabulary separate, because mixing them is what makes an otherwise solid paper read as confused. Autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice are **principles**. Utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics are **theories**, and they sit a level above principles rather than beside them. Confidentiality, veracity and fidelity are **rules**, derived from principles and narrower than them. A sentence offering “the doctor violated utilitarianism” has confused a theory with a principle. Note too that the four are prima facie: each binds unless another outweighs it in the case at hand, so a well-analysed situation usually ends with a principle **outweighed** rather than simply violated. That framing is more accurate, and it is more interesting, because it obliges you to say what did the outweighing. Name the level you are working at when you switch between them, because a reader cannot tell whether a shift from principle to theory is deliberate or accidental.