What's this about?

Scenario: You are raising a beautiful, one-year-old daughter. You discover that due to a mix-up at the hospital, she is not biologically yours. She is the biological daughter of a different couple, who has been raising your biological son. What would you do?

Scenario: You are the newly-hired coach of your town's basketball team. The father of one of your players is a basketball expert, but also well-known as an alcoholic. His actions repeatedly have embarrassed his son, and their relationship clearly is strained. You recognize that aside from his alcohol addiction, the father's intentions are well-meaning. He approaches you and asks you to hire him as an assistant coach. Not only would it add another basketball mind on your bench, it also could provide the father an opportunity to straighten himself out and mend the relationship with his son. Would you hire him?

Scenario: You work as a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at the local hospital. As the flu season approaches, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) predicts a flu pandemic. The hospital administration responds by forcing you to get a flu shot. The strain of the flu is relatively unknown, and the vaccine that is being developed is brand new and unproven. You are concerned about potential side effects of the vaccine because it could put you and your family at risk. Do you comply with the hospital's mandate, or do you refuse because of your concern?

None of these scenarios leads to a right or wrong answer, but it is fun to explore them and other ethical dilemmas. I intend to use this blog to dissect scenarios (whether completely hypothetical, somewhat fictionalized, or completely true). I chose a blog format for several reasons:

• Foremost, I am doing this as an assignment for a graduate class that I am taking this semester
  
• Ease/convenience: I have found that writing (or typing, in this case) my thoughts, my notes, my ideas, etc., is a very effective way for me to absorb material. Rather than writing these words with pen and paper, it's just much easier to type them
• A blog, at least in concept, gives other people a chance to give feedback
• Because I work with college students who tend to communicate electronically MUCH more frequently than I do, a blog gives me an opportunity to explore such an arena a little more intimately
• To bore you...are you still reading this?
  

My goal is to post on this blog at least twice per week for the fall 2009 semester. I suspect that most of my topics will be inspired by real-life scenarios that I experience at work. (I will protect the identites of those involved, of course.) I also expect some of my own experiences at home will offer plenty of topics.

I hope to explore topics like those above through the lenses of the ethical theories that we study in our class. My hope is that by the end of this project, I will have a better idea of my own ethical perspectives. Secondary, I hope to become more familiar with trendy electronic communication tools, like blogs.