Ethical Awareness and Ethical Orientation of Turkish Teachers

This study inquires ethical evaluation of teachers, investigating their moral reasoning to ethical decision making, in Turkey. Specifically three hypotheses were tested: Overall ethical awareness of teachers is high; Teachers will identify reasons for ethical evaluation related to philosophical values such as justice, deontology, utilitarianism, relativism and egoism; and the willingness of the teachers to take questionable actions is low. A survey was conducted among 117 teachers who were voluntarily participated to the survey. The author created eight scenarios in education context, and modified the Multidimensional Ethics Scale into Turkish. The scale was reduced into four dimension; justice, utilitarianism, relativism and egoism, after the modification process. Results revealed that, overall ethical awareness of the teachers is high. Secondly, philosophical values affect the participants' ethical evaluation; especially justice has the strongest effect on their ethical reasoning. Lastly, they are not willing to take the unethical action. This paper aimed to contribute ethics and education studies exploring teachers' ethical decision-making, using and philosophical values as reason.