ETHICS-JERA

• The word "ethics" comes from the Greek word ethos, which means character or disposition.
• ethics entails that the person lives and actualizes moral principles in her everyday concerns
• “For what purpose does acquisition of meaning of virtue have if one is unable to live by it?”-ARISTOTLE
• ethics is about cultivating and building one’s character – a character of virtue – and it does not happen overnight. Its possibility is gradually realized by painstakingly choosing the moral path – by choosing what is right and good in everything we do from the smallest to the grandest.
• Ethics- It is a branch of philosophy that studies the rightness or wrongness of a human action
• Morality - tells us what we ought to do and urge us to follow the right way
• Ethics is a branch of philosophy that studies the rightness or wrongness of a human action
• Terrance McConnell stated that morality is characterized as an “end- governed rational enterprise” whose object is to equip people with a body of norms that make for peaceful and collectively satisfying coexistence by facilitating their living together and interacting in a way that is productive for the realization of the general benefit.
• Ethics concerned with questions of how human persons ought to act, and the search for a definition of a right conduct and the good life
• Normative Ethics - is prescriptive in nature as it seeks to set norms or standards that regulate right and wrong or good and bad conduct.
• Normative Ethics -involves articulating good habits that we should that we should follow, or the consequences of our behavior on others.
• normative ethics normally attempts to develop guidelines or theories that tell us how we ought to behave.
• Metaethics - is descriptive in nature
• According to Sumner, “metaethics is allegedly constituted, at least in part by questions of the meanings of the various ethical terms and functions of ethical utterances”.
• Metaethics a type of ethical inquiry that aims to understand the nature and dynamics of ethical principles.
• Metaethics- asks questions about the origin and nature of moral facts, as well as the way in
• Applied Ethics - the actual application of ethical and moral theories for the purpose of deciding which ethical or moral actions are appropriate in a given situation.
• Applied ethics was usually divided into different fields: •Business ethics

  •Biomedical and environmental ethics

  •Social ethics
• Business ethics – ethical behavior in the corporate world
• Biomedical and environmental ethics – deals with issues relating to health, welfare and the responsibility we have towards people and our environment
• Social ethics – deals with principles and guidelines that regulate corporate welfare within societies
• - how a person tunes in with morality

  -concerned with how the person fair ETHICS
• -rules of conduct with which

  -concerned with the standards of right and wrong

  MORALITY
• Descriptive- code of conduct put forward by a society or group or accepted by an individual for her own behavior
• Normative- morality refers to a code of conduct that given specified conditions would be put forward by all rational persons
• Descriptive ▪ no universal morality as there are various societies ▪ relevant rules of conduct apply to a certain class of people
• Normative ▪ there can be a universal moral principle ▪ presupposes a moral agent, who possesses certain conditions, such as freedom and rationality, which makes her choice truly hers.
• Moral Standards - aims to provide individuals with proper guidance as to why some actions are morally desirable or prejudicial
• • moral standard is one that not only tells that some actions are desirable because they are good for oneself and others but that is acceptable by rational actors as well
• Non-moral Standards - rules which do not concern moral actions or judgments
• Non-moral Standards: tells us what is preferrable or not but does not tell us valuing some goods are necessarily right or wrong.
• Non-Moral Standards, Examples are:

  •black is beautiful •health is wealth •do not talk if the mouth is full
• Moral Standards, Examples:

  •do not kill •do not steal •do not tell a lie
• Moral Dilemmas - a dilemma is a situation where the individual is torn between two or more conflicting options
• applied to ethics, it places the moral agent in a situation that requires her to choose between two or more conflicting moral requirements
• Elements of a moral dilemma: ▪ An agent ▪ An obligation to act on each of the two or more options ▪ The agent cannot do both or all possible options
• False Moral Dilemma is not a dilemma at all since one of the agent's seemingly conflicting moral obligations overrides the others
• Genuine Moral Dilemma is one in which neither of the possible course of action overrides the others
• Causes of Moral Dilemmas:

  •Epistemic and ontological conflict

  •Self and world-imposed dilemmas
• Epistemic conflict – a situation where the agent does not know what option is morally right