Ethics and Financial Aid

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the system of student financial aid has been set up with an ethical purpose, and, as such, it can be argued that any attempt to deceive the system is unethical, since it defeats the envisioned end of achieving social justice. The author states that John's parents need to focus on harnessing public support to reform a faulty system rather than resorting to cheating, which represents a solution that only perpetuates an injustice rather then resolving it. The paper suggests that a better formula for financial aid could be based on criteria that takes into account the number of children in the family who have yet to go to college or who are already in college and a family's annual income, excluding earnings from assets built up over the long term.

From the Paper:

"John's parents may have found the current system of determining student financial aid rough on middle class families who scrimped and saved for their children's future. But the fact remains that the action they were proposing was unethical and immoral since even Hume would have asked whether John's parents"' feelings were representative of the universal view. Even assuming, for the purposes of this discussion, that the majority of the voting public agreed with John's parents about the unfairness of the financial aid system, it must still be taken into consideration that John's parents were essentially deriving moral principles from one particular context. This is evident since the morality of the decision would be unlikely to apply in another context. Indeed, if the need for financial integrity were to be dependent on a given context, it would unravel the very functioning of the economy and human society."

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