This article encourages community college leaders to employ ethical paradigms when constructing and considering alternative courses of action in decision-making processes. The authors discuss four previously articulated paradigms (e.g., ethic of justice, ethic of critique, ethic of care, and ethic of the profession) and propose an additional paradigm—the ethic of local community. The ethic of local community is a communitarian and utilitarian frame embodied by the philosophical underpinnings and mission of the community college. Questions designed for praxis are proffered following a discourse on how each paradigm is defined and described in extant literature.
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