Fundamentals Of Ethics

Fundamentals Of Ethics

• 1.
  FUNDAMENTALS OF ETHICS In this chapter, we discussed Socrates and the value of questions that affect how we should live. We learned why we must examine our life, and why an “unexamined life is not worth living”. We learned how Socrates made his investigations through a process referred to today as the Socratic Method. We also defined Ethics as the study of methods and principles used to distinguish good from bad, right from wrong actions. There are four general reasons why we need to study Ethics: 1) Ethics makes clear to us why one act is better than another 2) Ethics contributes an orderly social life by providing humanity some basis for agreement, understanding some principles or rules of procedure 3) Moral conduct and ethical systems, both of the past and the present, must be intelligently appraised and criticized 4) Ethics seeks to point out to men the true values of life. Ethics has two basic assumptions: one, that man is a rational being, and two, that man is free. These basic assumptions affect the degree of our moral responsibility. We discussed the two objects of Ethics: the physical object or the doer of the act, and the nonphysical object or the act done by the doer. The nonphysical object of Ethics has two types, the acts of man and the human acts. Because it has moral value, moral acts or human acts are said to be the formal object of Ethics. This chapter also dealt with the three general classifications of the nonmaterial object of Ethics: moral (ethical), immoral (unethical) and amoral (neutral). Components of the moral act were also presented and discussed: the means and the end. End and consequence were also differentiated. As to the forms of ethical analysis, we discussed two: descriptive and normative ethical analysis. Descriptive ethics is used in the social sciences, while most philosophers believed that ethics is, for the most part, normative. Normative ethics includes the following theories:
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  Consequentialist (Teleological) Ethics,Nonconsequentialist (Deontological) Ethics, Authoritarian Ethics, Ethical Egoism, and the Situational Ethics. Uncertainty or conflicts of opinion about what ought to be done give rise to three general forms of ethics: Practical Ethics, Theoretical Ethics and Skepticism. The difference between Social and Personal Ethics was also discussed. But it was pointed out that Personal Ethics is necessarily social because it can only be understood when put in its proper socials context.