Let’s talk about five ethical principles that you can use to guide your behavior and decision making in your personal and professional life (regardless of your line of work and living situation). These five principles can help you with both small and big ethical decisions. Subsequent chapters will look at each of the five principles in more detail.

The five basic ethical principles to live by are

• integrity
• competence
• responsibility
• respect
• concern.

While these five principles are certainly not cast in stone, they’re useful and productive way to think about how to live your everyday life. They can be applied to just above ethical situation.

cultivating the five ethical principles

If you’re hoping to filter your daily decisions through the lens of useful ethical principles, you’ll need to find a way to easily remember the five ethical principles that you are using. One easy way to remember them is to use the acronym RRIC, which stands for respect, responsibility, integrity, competence, and concern. You can pronounce it like the male name “Rick”.

Remember, the five ethical principles are not cast in stone. You can choose to modify them or strive toward certain principles that are more meaningful to you. So, as you read this, feel free to adapt the list so that the principles are tailored to your needs and values.

The next step is to seek good models of ethical behavior. You need to surround yourself with people who behave in an ethical way. Social psychology research over the course of many years has made it clear that people tend to model their beliefs and behavior comes home from school with a new phrase, attitude, idea, perspective on events, and fashion sense. As adults, we also tend to compare our beliefs, attitudes, material possessions, parenting style, and so forth, with that of others. Therefore, the odds of making good ethical decisions in your daily life are low if you do not surround yourself with others of like mind.

You also need to reflect on your behavior and the behavior of others. You need to be able to evaluate and analyze decisions through the lens of ethics. At the beginning of the ethics seminar that I give for Stanford trainees, I ask them to start an ethics diary. They are asked to jot down each time they encounter an ethical dilemma and make a few notes about what the conflicting issues or ethical question is all about. During the beginning of the seminar, they have trouble coming up with many items between seminar sessions, but by the end of the seminar, they have numerous examples to share. Over time, if you practice, you too will be much more sensitive and attune to ethical issues. You will be better able to see subtle (and not so subtle) ethical dilemmas and be able to thoughtfully reflect on them.

You also need to test yourself. You need to have various experiences that help you understand what you are made of in terms of ethical behavior. You have likely hear the prhase, “It was a character-building experience.” Adversity, challenges, troubles, and crises all provide tests of your character and your ethics. It is easy to feel that you are an ethical and moral person when everything goes your way and you have few troubles. It is very different if you have had challenging life experiences that have tested your character.

Finally, you need to find ways to repeatedly use these principles and learn from them. Again, if you can see ethical issues and act appropriately in your daily decision, you’ll be better able to make those really tough ethical decision whey you confront them.

excerpt from Do the Right Thing: Living Ethically in an Unethical World by Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D., ABPP