2

• Gawi

  Thoughtful, intentional inclination or habit
• Gawa

  Free, purposeful action
• Freedom

  • Willful act and decision that give form and shape to actions and inclinations
  • Oriented toward the wherefore, the what for, and the whom for the doings of people
• Gawi and gawa are not identical
• Gawa

  Free action oriented toward a particular end
• Gawi

  Free kind of work, habitual action that reveals truth about a person
• Kagawian

  Habitual action, Filipino equivalent of ethos in Greek and mos or moris in Latin
• Ethics

  Comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning custom, characteristic, or habitual way of doing things
• Etymologically, ethics is a survey of patterns of behavior
• Ethics cannot be limited to pure description, as goals are inherently directional and imply normativity
• Praxis

  Human actions that are ruled by one's freedom, focus on the human agent revealed through actions
• Poiein

  Human actions focused on successfully completing a particular work, the human person is significant only in considering the result
• Ethics is normative, it guides human action and proposes guidelines, considerations, and norms for right living
• Ethics allows one to learn the art of living, be reconciled with freedom, and find happiness
• Ethics considers what is worthy of a human being, living rightly brings contentment and approval
• Plato established the academic institution of learning (academia) and grappled with the question of the good
• Plato's context was one of social, political, and intellectual challenge due to the expansion of trade and exchange of different perspectives
• Protagoras claimed "man is the measure of all things", leading to relativism
• Socrates taught Plato about the difficulty but not impossibility of arriving at truth through rigorous questioning
• Plato's allegory of the cave portrays the confrontation between Socratic inquiry and easy lack of thought
• Plato asserts that once the good is known, it is followed and lived even at the cost of one's life, negating Glaucon's claim that actions are only directed by the avoidance of shame or retribution
• Plato's confidence in the human person's ability to know the good and act accordingly started the academic history of ethics
• Thinkers after Plato have challenged the necessity between knowledge and action, questioning whether knowing the good automatically leads to acting on it