Ethics

​This is a tough one for my project, considering the fact that it plays with women’s health and rights and it is tackling an extremely controversial subject, to many it seems, unethical. The ethics theory that I have been researching about for the past couple weeks was the self-interest theory. This means that technically humans will always be selfish, it is considered as the opposite of moral behavior, according to this theory, even if there are objective moral values, humans are not able to live up to them. The human race is naturally born selfish, they are made to pursue their interest but society doesn’t see it that way and doesn’t always accept it, in order to survive every human reaches to be the best but doesn’t always realize that often times that means it’s going to require a bit of selfishness.

Concerning my project, we make decisions that are based on what we think is best or what our community would benefit from. These decisions are our thoughts and what we see as issues or specific situations that could be fixable. This is where the self-interest theory plays in because for others what we may be doing is entirely wrong and is selfish because perhaps the issues that we are trying to work on do not need any fixing, and it is just us who sees this as a problem. Teen pregnancy to many is no big deal and has just become part of our culture, often times something that isn’t even frowned upon anymore. The C.E.P.I.A team wants to make this change in our community and attempt to show these teens that they have other options instead of having unwanted children that will not prepare them for their future or having a steady education and career. At this point to us, it doesn’t seem like a selfish decision it feels more like a selfless one, but that isn’t the case to all eyes. We live in an extremely religious country so to a lot of native Costa Ricans what we are doing may be seen as very selfish. This may be because we are forcing our values upon our community because we could think that they are the correct ones, that we only care about helping these women out of pity or that we want to change the culture here because we think ours is better.

If we break these down, they are all extremely ethical issues that could arise, and this is because our project is genuinely based on ethical decisions and does involve itself in delicate problems. As a team, we understand that not everyone will support this project, that many will see it as a crime or something that will have a negative impact on our community. But we believe otherwise, and this may be all of our self-interest taking act because we think what we are doing is correct and will make a positive change.