Can social, organisations and disciplinary values guide decisions when thinking about ethical challenges? With this presentation, I describe the ambivalence of decision-making when it comes to being a cause or a valuable resource for acting upon ethics challenges. Furthermore, I describe how personal, organisational, and disciplinary values influence our attitudes to research, and indicate that cultivating values, such as sustainability, in everyday tasks can generate more informed decisions, and ethical research processes. For example, design research outputs can be used to empower local communities to create more sustainable practices.