Three values should be considered when making an ethical decision: rights, excuses, and human flourishing. These authors suggest several guidelines to ethical problem-solving. They include recognizing the existence of a problem, identifying the problem, creating alternatives, evaluating the alternatives, and publicly justifying each of the alternatives. There are four major traditional schools of ethical thought from which police officers can obtain insights into values that may help them in their decision making. Egoism holds that the basis of ethics is self-interest, utilitarianism holds that ethics is based on the happiness of the community, natural law believes that ethics is based on human nature, and the school of human rights holds that the basis of ethics is treating persons as persons. 8 references