DILEMA TRAINING.

Business ethicists have developed some useful methodologies in their capacities as

consultants; Dilema Training is an exemplary one. Among many such models, the one
developed by Henk van Luijk, Profesor Emeritus of Business Ethics an Nijenrode
University (Holland's equivalent of the Harvard Business School) in an excellent
illustration. It has been taught to and implemented successfully by philosophical
consultant in the Netherlands and the U.S.A
The empirically well-founded premise of dilemma training is that people employed by
organizations experience particular kinds of moral conflicts in the workplace, which
they are usually ill-prepared to manage or resolve. Examples of these include issues of
loyalty to the organization itself, conflicts between private morality and professional
ethics (or company policy), choices between complicity or honesty in matters of whitecollar crime, the question of whistle-blowing, and other issues devolving about doing
one's job with integrity.
Dilemma Training is a seven-step program for identifying, articulating and managing
such problems in the workplace itself. Since ethics is not axiomatizable, there is no
algorithmic or infallibly prescriptive way to solve moral dilemmas; however, the seven
steps of dilemma training allow one at least to understand a problem in a way that lends
itself to more effective management. The examined problem is not necessarily the
solved one, but the solved problem i rarely the unexamined one. The seven steps are:

1.- Formulate the core issue. What is the moral etichal conflict about?
2.- Identify the actors. Whose rights and claims need to be taken into account?
3.- Gather data. What minimun information is necessary and relevant in this case?
4.- Specify responsibility. Who is accountable? Who has the dilemma?
5.- Elaborate arguments, both pro and con. What reasons support possible resolutions?
At this stage, plurality is a virtue.
6.- Attempt a decision. Which arguments are most persuasive, and why?
7.- Justify the decision. Can you live with this? Wolud the same reasoing apply again?
What would have to change for your decision to change?
While any college instructor or university professor of applied ethics will recognize
some of the foregoing steps as typical in pedagogic elaboration of case studies, e.g., in
classroom exercises involving business ethics, engineering ethics biomedical ethics, and
the like, there is also a conspicuous difference between the classroom and the workplace,
akin to the difference between boot-camp and combat. While many students take
casework quite seriously, they are also able to set it aside at the end of a period or the
completion of an assignment.
By contrast, people who experience moral dilemmas in real-life situations are unable to
set them aside, or leave them behind, until or unless the find some way to effect an
equilibration or harmonization of the problem.

Similarly, the college instructor who competently or even expertly guides his class
through an exercise in applied ethical reasoning is not necessarily able to perform the
equivalent function outside the groves of academe - where it is often more sorely
required. As with all the above- mentioned methodologies the mere acquisition of a tool
does not automatically entail expertise in its utilization. The emphasis in the phrase
"philosophical practice" is not accidental; effective implementation of the methodology
as a practitioner is a matter of training and praxis.

Extracted of Philosophical Practice by Lou Marinoff.