ethics

• Moral good

  The good or wrong
• Moral awareness

  Determines the degree of responsibility for one's acts
• Conscience

  Judges the good, rightness or wrongness of one's acts
• Subjective morality is insufficient
• Objective morality

  Conscience should agree with
• Good

  A simple concept that is unanalyzable into anything simpler, and therefore indefinable
• End

  That for the sake of which a thing is done
• Human beings have a nature that makes it natural for them to seek the good as their end
• Useful/instrumental good

  Desirable because it leads to something more desirable
• Pleasant good

  Desirable for the satisfaction or enjoyment it gives
• Befitting good

  Contributes toward the perfection of our being as a whole, fits a human being as such
• The moral good is necessary, not optional
• Moral necessity

  Comes from the object, the kind of act I am performing
• Value

  Something that appeals to us in some way
• Moral values

  Those that make a person good purely and simply as a person
• Moral value can exist only in a free personal being and in that person's voluntary or human acts
• Moral value

  Universal, self-justifying, has preeminence over every other value, implies obligation
• Moral ideal

  An ideal of human conduct and an ideal of personhood
• Relativism holds that there is nothing good or bad absolutely, but all morality is relative to the individual or to the society
• Ethical relativism

  There is no common morality for the whole world, only morality relative to our time
• Abstraction

  The process of deriving universal concepts from particular ideas
• Happiness

  The conscious state of satisfaction from the fulfillment of desire by the possession of the good
• Perfect happiness

  The complete possession of the perfect good, fully satisfying all desires
• Absolutely perfect

  Incapable of increase, only applicable to God
• Relatively perfect

  Completely satisfying to a creature (human person), according to their finite capacity
• Opportunism

  Refusing to have a goal in life in order to remain open and uncommitted
• Pragmatism

  Judging the moral value of acts by their consequences, not limiting itself to pleasurable ones
• Hedonism


  Picking egoistic pleasure as the highest good
• Utilitarianism

  The extension of hedonism to the pleasure of the group and all of humankind, measuring morality by utility in promoting the common welfare
• Stoicism


  A philosophy focused on practical wisdom, self-discipline, and accepting the nature of the world and people as they are