Ethics
**Ethics Overview:**
– Ethics is the study of moral phenomena, evaluating conduct, character traits, and institutions.
– It explores obligations, right and wrong behavior, and how to lead a good life.
– Ethics can refer to rational systems of moral principles and societal moral codes.
– Divided into normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.
**Normative Ethics Theories:**
– Normative ethics seeks universal principles determining right and wrong conduct.
– Aims to guide behavior by helping people make moral decisions.
– Theories like consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics propose various moral principles.
– Contrasts with descriptive ethics and applied ethics.
**Deontological Ethics:**
– Focuses on fulfilling duties, following rules, and intrinsic nature of actions.
– Emphasizes intentions, moral character, and inherent rightness or wrongness of actions.
– Includes Kantian Deontology, Rights-Based Deontology, Divine Command Theory, and Agent-Centered Deontology.
– Kantianism emphasizes universalizability of moral actions and rejects consequences as the sole determinant of morality.
**Applied Ethics and Specialized Branches:**
– Deals with real-life moral problems and applies general ethical principles.
– Includes bioethics, medical ethics, business ethics, and professional ethics.
– Bioethics covers moral issues related to living organisms and biological disciplines.
– Medical ethics focuses on ethical guidelines for medical practitioners and issues like abortion and euthanasia.
**Ethical Principles in Various Religions:**
– Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, and Confucian ethics.
– Jewish ethics involve following God’s commandments, while Christian ethics emphasize self-less love.
– Islam’s Five Pillars focus on faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage.
– Buddhism and Jainism prioritize compassion and non-violence, Hindu ethics revolve around fulfilling social obligations, and Confucianism values harmony and benevolence.
Ethics or moral philosophy is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. It investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. It is usually divided into three major fields: normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.
Normative ethics discovers and justifies universal principles that govern how people should act in any situation. According to consequentialists, an act is right if it leads to the best consequences. Deontologists hold that morality consists in fulfilling duties, like telling the truth and keeping promises. Virtue theorists see the manifestation of virtues, like courage and compassion, as the fundamental principle of morality. Applied ethics examines concrete ethical problems in real-life situations, for example, by exploring the moral implications of the universal principles discovered in normative ethics within a specific domain. Bioethics studies moral issues associated with living organisms including humans, animals, and plants. Business ethics investigates how ethical principles apply to corporations, while professional ethics focuses on what is morally required of members of different professions. Metaethics is a metatheory that examines the underlying assumptions and concepts of ethics. It asks whether moral facts have mind-independent existence, whether moral statements can be true, how it is possible to acquire moral knowledge, and how moral judgments motivate people.
Ethics is closely connected to value theory, which studies what value is and what types of value there are. Moral psychology is a related empirical field and investigates psychological processes involved in morality, such as moral reasoning and the formation of moral character. Descriptive ethics provides value-neutral descriptions of the dominant moral codes and beliefs in different societies and considers their historical dimension.
The history of ethics started in the ancient period with the development of ethical principles and theories in ancient Egypt, India, China, and Greece. This period saw the emergence of ethical teachings associated with Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and contributions of philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle. During the medieval period, ethical thought was strongly influenced by religious teachings. In the modern period, this focus shifted to a more secular approach concerned with moral experience, practical reason, and the consequences of actions. An influential development in the 20th century was the emergence of metaethics.