Ethics is a systematic and critical analysis of morality, of the moral factors that guide human conduct in a particular society or practice. Ethics defines the elements essential to human well-being and proposes principles to be used as guidelines for generating an ethical culture. Ethics also refers to the specific values, standards, rules, and agreements people adopt for conducting their lives.
Ethics, most broadly, is the study of human behavior and its consequences in the light of what is ideally possible. For example, ethicists might study a society's mores or morals to determine what effect they would have on humankind if they were used as universal standards.
Ethics are not merely social conventions, like table manners. Ethics define the social conditions necessary for human beings to thrive.
How do we know what is ethical?
Ethical wisdom is the product of a long history of human struggle. By trial and error societies discover how to create mutually enhancing relationships. Yet ethics also come from the reality-producing function of the mind.
In addition to being propelled by events of the past, human beings are simultaneously drawn forward by their view of the possibilities of the future. When people act "as if" something can
happen, they can behave so as to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. The challenge is to understand what conditions lead to human well-being, envision an ideal ethical culture, and then derive principles that would create a good life.
Dickson (2013, Rundu Campus) indicated that ethics are set moral principles that govern a person's or group's behavior. When someone is behaving ethically they conform to generally accepted practices of a society or group. Most ethically acceptable practices are universal such as.
Each society has a set of rules that set boundaries for acceptable behavior, these rules are often expressed in statements about how you should behave. These statements come together to form a moral code by which a society lives. Morals are ideas held about right and wrong or values, these ideas sometimes come into conflict with one another.
According to Dickson (October 19, 2013) behavior (morals) follows values (manners) and contributes to the stability of society. Everyone works within their own moral code, which means you act with integrity. Laws on the other hand are a system of rules that society imposes on individuals that define whether or not one is allowed to do something. Institutions like law enforcement enforce laws. Laws may or may not follow the moral code for individuals or ethical considerations.
It addresses matters of public policy as well as more personal matters. On the one hand, it draws strength from our social environment, established practices, law, religion, and individual conscience.
On the other hand, it critically assesses each of these sources of strength. So, ethics is complex and often perplexing and controversial. It defies concise, clear definitions. Yet, it is something with which all of us, including young children, have a working familiarity.
Ethical Culture proposes that the state of spiritual-ethical harmony would be created whenever people live by these three guidelines taken together:
• Act as a member of an ideal ethical culture with a sense of interdependence with humanity and nature.
• Act so as to achieve your own full and unique potential.
• Act so as to elicit the best and most distinctive qualities in others and thereby in oneself.
The terms morality and ethics are often interchanged. Ethics has a double meaning. It may refer to the study of our values and their justification. In this sense it is often called moral philosophy, on the other hand ethics may also mean the actual values and rules of conduct by which we live, or our morality.
So, we may say that the study of ethics includes the study of morality which generally refers to a particular ethic or the moral tradition of a given religion or society. Nonetheless, the adjectives moral and ethical may be accurately interchanged.
TYPES OF ETHICS
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META-ETHICS
The term “meta” means after or beyond. We can define meta ethics as the study of the origin and meaning of ethical concepts. Meta ethics is a branch of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words. Meta ethics searches for the origins or causes of right and wrong. Meta ethics focuses on what morality itself is.
Meta ethics could also said to be , the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice. As such, it counts within its domain a broad range of questions and puzzles, including: Is morality more a matter of taste than truth? Are moral standards culturally relative? Are there moral facts? If there are moral facts, what is their origin? How is it that they set an appropriate standard for our behavior? How might moral facts be related to other facts (about psychology, happiness, human conventions…)? And how do we learn about moral facts, if there are any? Meta ethics explores as well the connection between values, reasons for action, and human motivation, asking how it is that moral standards might provide us with reasons to do or refrain from doing as it demands, and it addresses many of the issues commonly bound up with the nature of freedom and its significance (or not) for moral responsibility. Metaethics investigates where our ethical principles come from, and what they mean.
Meta-ethical positions may be divided according to how they respond to questions such as the following:
What exactly are people doing when they use moral words such as “good” and “right”?
What precisely is a moral value in the first place, and are such values similar to other familiar sorts of entities, such as objects and properties?
Where do moral values come from—what is their source and foundation?
Are some things morally right or wrong for all people at all times, or does morality instead vary from person to person, context to context, or culture to culture?
NORMATIVE ETHICS
Normative Ethics proposes that right and wrong can be found within scenarios. Normative Ethics: attempt to answer specific moral questions concerning what people should do or believe. The word "normative" refers to guidelines or norms and is often used interchangeably with the word "prescriptive. Normative ethics involves arriving at moral standards that regulate right and wrong conduct.
Normative ethics is interested in determining the content of our moral behavior. Normative ethical theories seek to provide action guides; procedures for answering the Practical Question ("What ought I to do?").
Examples of behaviors that are judged as right or wrong in Normative Ethics are honesty, lying, and stealing. The behaviors being judged by Normative Ethics are actions that have already occurred and are then being interpreted by the observer to be "honesty," "lying," or others.
To summarize, Normative Ethics attempts to discover the standards of right and wrong within the end-products of things like honesty, and not within the origins of the natural laws that dictate what is right and wrong.
APPLIED ETHICS
Applied Ethics attempts to deal with specific realms of human action and to craft criteria for discussing issues that might arise within those realms. Applied Ethics can also be defined as the following:
-A classification within western philosophy.
What do people claim as their moral norms?
How do people actually behave when it comes to moral problems?
Here are some examples of statements from Descriptive Ethics:
Most Americans think that racism is wrong.
Among certain cultures, there is no stigma attached to homosexuality.
VIRTUE ETHICS
Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics.
It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach which emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that which emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism).
Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped.
A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being,
a deontologist to the fact that, in doing so the agent will be acting in accordance with a moral rule such as “Do unto others as you would be done by” and a virtue ethicist to the fact that helping the person would be charitable or benevolent.
Virtue ethics is a broad term for theories that emphasize the role of character and virtue in moral philosophy rather than either doing one’s duty or acting in order to bring about good consequences.
Most virtue ethics theories take their inspiration from Aristotle who declared that a virtuous person is someone who has ideal character traits.
These traits derive from natural internal tendencies, but need to be nurtured; however, once established, they will become stable. For example, a virtuous person is someone who is kind across many situations over a lifetime because that is her character and not because she wants to maximize utility or gain favors or simply do her duty. Unlike deontological and consequentialist theories, theories of virtue ethics do not aim primarily to identify universal principles that can be applied in any moral situation. And virtue ethics theories deal with wider questions—“How should I live?” “What is the good life?” and “What are proper family and social values?”
Character-based ethics
• A right act is the action a virtuous person would do in the same circumstances.
Virtue ethics is person rather than action based: it looks at the virtue or moral character of the person carrying out an action, rather than at ethical duties and rules, or the consequences of particular actions.
Virtue ethics not only deals with the rightness or wrongness of individual actions, it provides guidance as to the sort of characteristics and behaviors a good person will seek to achieve.
In that way, virtue ethics is concerned with the whole of a person's life, rather than particular episodes or actions.
• A good person is someone who lives virtuously - who possesses and lives the virtues. It's a useful theory since human beings are often more interested in assessing the character of another person than they are in assessing the goodness or badness of a particular action. This suggests that the way to build a good society is to help its members to be good people, rather than to use laws and punishments to prevent or deter bad actions.
COMPARATIVE ETHICS
Comparative ethics, also called Descriptive Ethics, the empirical (observational) study of the moral beliefs and practices of different peoples and cultures in various places and times.
It aims not only to elaborate such beliefs and practices but also to understand them insofar as they are causally conditioned by social, economic, and geographic circumstances. Comparative ethics, in contrast to normative ethics, is thus the proper subject matter of the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, history, sociology, and psychology).
Empirical studies show that all societies have moral rules that prescribe or forbid certain classes of action and that these rules are accompanied by sanctions to ensure their enforcement of particular interest in comparative ethics are the similarities and differences between the moral practices and beliefs of different people, as explained by physical and economic conditions, opportunities for cross-cultural contacts, and the force of inherited traditions facing new social or technological challenges. It has been observed, for example, that virtually every society has well-established norms dealing with such matters as family organization and individual duties, sexual activity, property rights, personal welfare, truth telling, and promise keeping, but not all societies have evolved the same norms for these various aspects of human conduct.
Some social scientists concentrate their attention on the universality of basic moral rules, such as those forbidding murder, theft, infidelity, and incest. Others are more concerned with the diversity of moral practices—e.g., monogamy versus polygamy; caring for the aged versus parricide; the forbidding of abortion versus voluntary feticide. The question then arises whether similarity or diversity is more fundamental, whether similarity supports the validity of the practice, and whether diversity supports relativism and skepticism. Clearly a consensus of all peoples in a moral opinion does not of itself establish validity. On the other hand, widespread agreement may support the argument that morality is rooted in human nature, and, if human nature is fundamentally everywhere the same, it will also manifest this similarity in significant ways, including morality. Such questions are philosophical and lie beyond the scope of the social sciences, which are restricted to empirically verifiable generalizations.
Another question concerns the development of morals. So far as this is an empirical issue, it must be distinguished from the question of whether there is progress in morality. For progress is an evaluative term whether the moral ideals, for example, or the practices of civilized peoples, or both, are higher than those of primitive peoples is itself a question of moral judgment rather than of social science. Still, social scientists and moral philosophers alike have noted important changes that have taken place in the historical development of various peoples.
UTILITARIAN ETHICS
These are principles that form the basis for most utilitarian theories. The principles must be used within the context of the theory and be grounded in the readings from the course. These are listed as only a guideline.
Principle of Utility: it is a principle that approves or disapproves of every action according to whether it increases or diminishes the amount of happiness of the party whose interest is in question.
a. Act Utilitarianism: An act is right if and only if it results in as much good as any available alternative. One cannot be both an act and a rule utilitarian at the same time; thus, using them both in your paper would be contradictory.
b. Rule Utilitarianism: An act is right if and only if it is required by a rule that is itself a member of a set of rules, the acceptance of which would lead to the greater good for society than any available alternative. One cannot be both an act and a rule utilitarian at the same time; thus, using them both in your paper would be contradictory.
Harm Principle: Society is justified in coercing the behavior of an individual in order to prevent her or him from injuring others; it is not justified in coercing her or him simply because the behavior is deemed immoral or harmful to herself or himself.
Principles of Consequences: In assessing consequences, the only thing that matters is the amount of happiness/good or unhappiness/bad that is caused or not caused. The right or good actions are those that produce the greatest amount of good over bad in the long term.
CONTRACT ETHICS
Morality consists of a set of rules (implicit or explicit), governing how people are to treat one another, which rational people will agree to accept, for their mutual benefit, on the condition that others follow those rules as well. Contract principles form the basis for many social contract theories. Some of these principles will work with either a consequentialist or non-consequentialist theory. If they are appropriate, you may use them as additional support in your paper. If you do use them, be sure they are consistent with other normative or prescriptive principles you use. Modern contract theories are based on the work of John Rawls, so if you use this approach, be sure you are familiar with his thought. The principles must be used within the context of the theory and be grounded in the readings from the course. These are listed as only a guideline.
Principle of Liberty: Each person has an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all.
Principle of Opportunity: There must be meaningful equality of opportunity in the competition among individuals for those positions in society that bring greater economic and social rewards.
Principle of Distributive Justice: Basic goods should be distributed so that the least advantaged members of society are benefited.
Principle of Justice: Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. The rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.
Principle of Need: Each person is guaranteed the primary social goods that are necessary to meet the normal costs of satisfying one's basic needs in the society in which one lives, assuming there are sufficient social and economic resources in his society to maintain the guaranteed minimum.
DUTY (Deontological) ETHICS
The most primitive ethical systems seem to be based on a system of obligations. The child does what the parent wants because the parent says so. Thus “deontological” (from the Greek word that denotes, “duty”, which derives from the Greek word for “bind”) ethics starts from the idea that some things are just wrong and mustn’t be done. The key idea here is that “the intent to obey the rule is more important than the outcome”. Goodness is the ability to understand and act on moral obligations. Fundamental binding principles should govern an individual or firm’s behavior under any circumstance. The two main sources of such principles are religion and Kantian ethics.
Religions – they have rules attributed to revelation from God or advice handed down from religious leaders. Religions have different rules about what believers should eat or do on certain holy days, but many bases their general guides to act on principles of reciprocity and symmetry. Religions have the advantage that their rules are accompanied by maxims and parables to guide behavior. A common belief provides support and motivation from fellow believers to follow through on the desired behavior..
