Ethics

Introduction

Wherever people live and work together, they evaluate their own actions and those of others as good or bad, justified or unjustified, fair or unfair, and they ascribe to others and to themselves in particular situations the responsibility for doing what should be done and not doing what should not be done. The entirety of the rules that these evaluations follow in everyday life is characterized as morality. Anyone publicly violating them incurs the disdain of the others. Insofar as people acknowledge the existence of moral rules, they also judge themselves before their own conscience. Moral rules therefore have a high status in subjective experiencing, thinking, and acting. Morality, however, can also be misused in order to give others a bad conscience. It can likewise be employed as a weapon to question the privileges of others or to defend one's own privileges. Finally, it can be used to create solidarity with others.

Moral rules can also find their way into national laws. But not all national laws have a moral basis. Whoever can be shown to have violated national laws must usually reckon with sanctions of the state, such as fines or prison terms. Finally, in addition to the rules of morality and the laws of the state, there are standards or norms, such as those of associations or professional organizations (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education, 1999; International Test Commission, 2000). These prescribe how the members of these organizations are to conduct themselves during the performance of their professional activities. Anyone who can be demonstrated to have violated these rules is threatened in the worst instance with expulsion from the professional organization, which in some countries can have legal consequences, namely, one can be prohibited from carrying out one's professional activities.

In the following, the term ‘ethics’ will be elucidated and the two main fields of ethics will be introduced. Then the main participants in the assessment process will be introduced and their ethically justifiable responsibilities and rights will be worked out against the backdrop of fundamental theories of normative ethics. This will then be followed by a presentation of the positions taken by the critics of normative ethics. In conclusion, the practical implications of professional codes of behaviour will be shown.

Ethics and its Branches

Ethics is a discipline of scientific philosophy (Frankena, 1963). It is concerned with evaluations. It is divided into two branches – meta-ethics and normative ethics. Meta-ethics examines the language of evaluation, the meaning of the evaluative terms, of evaluative standards and of their logical implications. A core insight of meta-ethics, which is called the Humean Law after the Scottish philosopher, states that no normative statement can logically follow solely from a descriptive statement: no findings, for example, on a person's intelligence, permit, in and of themselves, a statement concerning the moral value of that person and of that person's dignity. Normative ethics examines the moral rules of groups and societies, national laws or standards of voluntary organizations. These norms are rationally examined on the basis of universal principles. The object of normative ethics is thus the rational examination of norms and the universally binding justification of principles.

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