Challenge Paper 1

Submitted By savanna083
Words: 1480
Pages: 6

Challenge Paper #1
Jia Wan
ID: 932131782
The in-class article “pharmacist's rights” reported a conflict between the pharmacists’ belief and clients’ rights. The pharmacist who think that dispensing the birth control pill against their moral standard sometimes refuse to sell the pill, at the same time the clients, especially women, feel their reproductive rights are taken away. Combining this article with the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire", my analysis is those pharmacists who refuse to fill the prescription that violate their beliefs probably have high scores in harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations. In their point of view, pregnancy is the point where the babies start their lives; it is cruel and unfair to “kill” the babies, some of these pharmacists are even willing to risk dismissal or discipline to maintain the value of their beliefs. These pharmacists are the “special members” of the entire pharmacists community, they bravely challenge the authority’s rules and insist on their own beliefs at all costs. Based on the facts above, these pharmacists may also have relatively high score in purity/sanctity foundation and relatively low scores in in-group/loyalty and authority/respect foundations. Through the general observation from “Moral Foundations Questionnaire", these pharmacists might majorly be liberals, who usually do not support the practices that conservatives favor. But this is a briefly guess, to learn more about those “special” pharmacists, we still need other solid evidences.
Before taking the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire" survey, I defined myself as slightly conservative in general. But the result graph showed that I fitted the general liberal scale more. In my country, personally, I’ve been told to be the one who thinks first of other people and obey the common rules such as the laws and organizations’ existing rules and regulations, and to have moral righteousness which is mainly based on virtue ethics and deontological ethics. For my family, the individual virtue is something that makes you strong and gentle, in this way you can build harmonious relationship with people around you, and also have a better understanding of other people such as their situations and actions. I didn’t really understand what exactly consist our moral. By taking this survey, I have a clear clue of some components of measuring human moral. People have different background, but all in all we are the same species with humanity. In my case, as I mentioned above that I thought I was slightly conservative, the results shown in the graph caused my self-evaluation.
I had high scores in the first two foundations, which are harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, and relatively low scores in in-group/loyalty and purity/sanctity foundations. The lowest score was in authority/respect foundation. From observation of my results, I’ve generally grown up to be the person that my parents wanted me to be. I care more about treating other people right and well, have sense of justice, fulfill my obligations in group, respect others and mean no harm to people or society and so on… these seem like basic human living principles though. What surprised me was the lowest score in authority/respect foundation. I will always respect the authority with no doubts; it is as same as respecting general people for me. What I didn’t think about was that I would not always treat the authority as supreme; I realized that even though I was supposed to learn and listen to the authorities, when something comes up that violate my beliefs or personal moral, I would say my thoughts to whatever authorities. I think it is important to express and to stand up for myself.
Some people may feel uncomfortable when someone throws her/his personal opinion against the boss or elder, the authorities. So that the “annoying person” might be isolated even sabotaged just for a glance from the authorities. In my opinion, to insert personal convictions in to work is performable