Critical Thinking and Ethics
Jae Smith
Gen 201
October 4, 2011
Rachel Bunch

Critical Thinking and Ethics

The key to becoming a critical thinker is to be able to generate your ethical understanding into ideas that have purpose and reasoning to which accurate conclusions are made. Critical thinking and personal ethics coincide in almost all circumstances whether it be mentally, socially or in the work place. Being able to use critical thinking while maintaining our ethics will benefit us in all aspects of life. Critical thinking can be defined differently depending on who you ask, but all definitions of critical thinking explained by others will have very similar aspects. Critical thinking is best defined as having the ability to be able to question a context in order to find reasoning. (Moore, 2010). Once reasoning is found one must learn how to research those particular logistics to be able to reach a better understanding of the context. Critical thinking does not stop once a decision is made, critical thinking can go on forever. There are always ways to identify better opinions, decisions or judgments with any and all aspects of life. There are 6 different steps to be taken in the critical thinking process. As cited in (Becoming a master student Chapter 7, thinking) the 6 steps in the critical thinking process is remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. All of these steps play key roles in the critical thinking process. When we read a context we must first remember the information by doing so we must be able to identify key terms, facts and events. Once we remember important inserts from the context we must then have a mental understanding of the material. When we have a better understanding of the key ideas we can then move on to applying or in other terms how we can use the information we have to produce a desired decision. Once a decision is made we can then analyze our final resolution by evaluating our different ideas. When our conclusion is met we can then ask ourselves if we can create something based on the outcome. Ethics is very different from critical thinking but in some aspects quite similar. Ethics as defined in the codes of conducts is the study that helps us understand what behaviors are expected and why. Ethics can be similar to critical thinking because we must still evaluate and determine whether or not something is right or wrong. Ethics differ throughout different scenarios whether it be personally, professionally or socially. Professional ethics can differ depending what your profession is but primary have the same types of values however revised depending on the type of work one does. For example, a physician will have different but similar ethics compared