Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most religions, of course, advocate high ethical standards. Yet if ethics were confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to religious people. But ethics applies as much to the behavior of the atheist as to that of the devout religious person.
Religion can set high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for ethical behavior. Ethics, however, cannot be confined to religion nor is it the same as religion. Being ethical is also not the same as following the law.
The law often incorporates ethical standards to which most citizens subscribe. But laws, like feelings, can deviate from what is ethical. Our own pre-Civil War slavery laws and the old apartheid laws of present-day South Africa are grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from what is ethical. Discuss- this is an all-encompassing directive which mandates us to write in detail about the key demand of the question.
The question wants us to write in detail about the reasons behind studying ethics. We have to bring out the importance of studying ethics in all the aspects. Introduction — write a few introductory lines about the meaning and scope of ethics. Consequentialism teaches that people should do whatever produces the greatest amount of good consequences. The most common forms of consequentialism are the various versions of utilitarianism, which favour actions that produce the greatest amount of happiness.
Despite its obvious common-sense appeal, consequentialism turns out to be a complicated theory, and doesn't provide a complete solution to all ethical problems. Non-consequentialism is concerned with the actions themselves and not with the consequences. It's the theory that people are using when they refer to "the principle of the thing".
It teaches that some acts are right or wrong in themselves, whatever the consequences, and people should act accordingly. Virtue ethics looks at virtue or moral character, rather than at ethical duties and rules, or the consequences of actions - indeed some philosophers of this school deny that there can be such things as universal ethical rules.
Virtue ethics is particularly concerned with the way individuals live their lives, and less concerned in assessing particular actions. It develops the idea of good actions by looking at the way virtuous people express their inner goodness in the things that they do. To put it very simply, virtue ethics teaches that an action is right if and only if it is an action that a virtuous person would do in the same circumstances, and that a virtuous person is someone who has a particularly good character.
Situation ethics rejects prescriptive rules and argues that individual ethical decisions should be made according to the unique situation. Rather than following rules the decision maker should follow a desire to seek the best for the people involved. There are no moral rules or rights - each case is unique and deserves a unique solution. Some philosophers teach that ethics is the codification of political ideology, and that the function of ethics is to state, enforce and preserve particular political beliefs.
They usually go on to say that ethics is used by the dominant political elite as a tool to control everyone else. More cynical writers suggest that power elites enforce an ethical code on other people that helps them control those people, but do not apply this code to their own behaviour.
One of the big questions in moral philosophy is whether or not there are unchanging moral rules that apply in all cultures and at all times. Some people think there are such universal rules that apply to everyone. This sort of thinking is called moral absolutism. Moral absolutism argues that there are some moral rules that are always true, that these rules can be discovered and that these rules apply to everyone. Immoral acts - acts that break these moral rules - are wrong in themselves, regardless of the circumstances or the consequences of those acts.
Absolutism takes a universal view of humanity - there is one set of rules for everyone - which enables the drafting of universal rules - such as the Declaration of Human Rights. Moral relativists say that if you look at different cultures or different periods in history you'll find that they have different moral rules. Therefore it makes sense to say that "good" refers to the things that a particular group of people approve of.
Moral relativists think that that's just fine, and dispute the idea that there are some objective and discoverable 'super-rules' that all cultures ought to obey. They believe that relativism respects the diversity of human societies and responds to the different circumstances surrounding human acts.
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Four ethical 'isms' Where does ethics come from? In recent years applied ethical issues have been subdivided into convenient groups such as medical ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics , and sexual ethics. The issue of drive-by shooting, for example, is not an applied ethical issue, since everyone agrees that this practice is grossly immoral. By contrast, the issue of gun control would be an applied ethical issue since there are significant groups of people both for and against gun control.
The second requirement for an issue to be an applied ethical issue is that it must be a distinctly moral issue. On any given day, the media presents us with an array of sensitive issues such as affirmative action policies, gays in the military, involuntary commitment of the mentally impaired, capitalistic versus socialistic business practices, public versus private health care systems, or energy conservation.
Although all of these issues are controversial and have an important impact on society, they are not all moral issues. Some are only issues of social policy. The aim of social policy is to help make a given society run efficiently by devising conventions, such as traffic laws, tax laws, and zoning codes. Moral issues, by contrast, concern more universally obligatory practices, such as our duty to avoid lying, and are not confined to individual societies.
Frequently, issues of social policy and morality overlap, as with murder which is both socially prohibited and immoral. However, the two groups of issues are often distinct. For example, many people would argue that sexual promiscuity is immoral, but may not feel that there should be social policies regulating sexual conduct, or laws punishing us for promiscuity.
Similarly, some social policies forbid residents in certain neighborhoods from having yard sales. But, so long as the neighbors are not offended, there is nothing immoral in itself about a resident having a yard sale in one of these neighborhoods. Thus, to qualify as an applied ethical issue, the issue must be more than one of mere social policy: it must be morally relevant as well. In theory, resolving particular applied ethical issues should be easy.
With the issue of abortion, for example, we would simply determine its morality by consulting our normative principle of choice, such as act-utilitarianism. If a given abortion produces greater benefit than disbenefit, then, according to act-utilitarianism, it would be morally acceptable to have the abortion. Unfortunately, there are perhaps hundreds of rival normative principles from which to choose, many of which yield opposite conclusions.
Thus, the stalemate in normative ethics between conflicting theories prevents us from using a single decisive procedure for determining the morality of a specific issue. The usual solution today to this stalemate is to consult several representative normative principles on a given issue and see where the weight of the evidence lies. Arriving at a short list of representative normative principles is itself a challenging task. The principles must also be seen as having merit by people on both sides of an applied ethical issue.
For this reason, principles that appeal to duty to God are not usually cited since this would have no impact on a nonbeliever engaged in the debate. The following principles are the ones most commonly appealed to in applied ethical discussions:. The above principles represent a spectrum of traditional normative principles and are derived from both consequentialist and duty-based approaches.
The first two principles, personal benefit and social benefit, are consequentialist since they appeal to the consequences of an action as it affects the individual or society. The remaining principles are duty-based.
The principles of benevolence, paternalism, harm, honesty, and lawfulness are based on duties we have toward others. The principles of autonomy, justice, and the various rights are based on moral rights. An example will help illustrate the function of these principles in an applied ethical discussion. In , a couple from Bloomington, Indiana gave birth to a baby with severe mental and physical disabilities.
Among other complications, the infant, known as Baby Doe, had its stomach disconnected from its throat and was thus unable to receive nourishment. Although this stomach deformity was correctable through surgery, the couple did not want to raise a severely disabled child and therefore chose to deny surgery, food, and water for the infant. Should corrective surgery have been performed for Baby Doe? Arguments against corrective surgery derive from the personal and social disbenefit which would result from such surgery.
If Baby Doe survived, its quality of life would have been poor and in any case it probably would have died at an early age. When examining both sides of the issue, the parents and the courts concluded that the arguments against surgery were stronger than the arguments for surgery. First, foregoing surgery appeared to be in the best interests of the infant, given the poor quality of life it would endure. For, to possess moral rights, it takes more than merely having a human body: certain cognitive functions must also be present.
The issue here involves what is often referred to as moral personhood, and is central to many applied ethical discussions.
As noted, there are many controversial issues discussed by ethicists today, some of which will be briefly mentioned here. Biomedical ethics focuses on a range of issues which arise in clinical settings.
Health care workers are in an unusual position of continually dealing with life and death situations. It is not surprising, then, that medical ethics issues are more extreme and diverse than other areas of applied ethics.
Prenatal issues arise about the morality of surrogate mothering, genetic manipulation of fetuses, the status of unused frozen embryos, and abortion.
Additional issues concern medical experimentation on humans, the morality of involuntary commitment, and the rights of the mentally disabled. Finally, end of life issues arise about the morality of suicide, the justifiability of suicide intervention, physician assisted suicide, and euthanasia. The field of business ethics examines moral controversies relating to the social responsibilities of capitalist business practices, the moral status of corporate entities, deceptive advertising, insider trading, basic employee rights, job discrimination, affirmative action, drug testing, and whistle blowing.
Issues in environmental ethics often overlaps with business and medical issues. These include the rights of animals, the morality of animal experimentation, preserving endangered species, pollution control, management of environmental resources, whether eco-systems are entitled to direct moral consideration, and our obligation to future generations. Controversial issues of sexual morality include monogamy versus polygamy, sexual relations without love, homosexual relations, and extramarital affairs.
Finally, there are issues of social morality which examine capital punishment, nuclear war, gun control, the recreational use of drugs, welfare rights, and racism. James Fieser Email: jfieser utm. Ethics The field of ethics or moral philosophy involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior.
Metaphysical Issues: Objectivism and Relativism Metaphysics is the study of the kinds of things that exist in the universe. Psychological Issues in Metaethics A second area of metaethics involves the psychological basis of our moral judgments and conduct, particularly understanding what motivates us to be moral. Egoism and Altruism One important area of moral psychology concerns the inherent selfishness of humans.
Emotion and Reason A second area of moral psychology involves a dispute concerning the role of reason in motivating moral actions.
Male and Female Morality A third area of moral psychology focuses on whether there is a distinctly female approach to ethics that is grounded in the psychological differences between men and women.
Normative Ethics Normative ethics involves arriving at moral standards that regulate right and wrong conduct. Duty Theories Many of us feel that there are clear obligations we have as human beings, such as to care for our children, and to not commit murder. Concerning our duties towards God, he argued that there are two kinds: a theoretical duty to know the existence and nature of God, and a practical duty to both inwardly and outwardly worship God.
Absolute duties are of three sorts: avoid wronging others, treat people as equals, and promote the good of others. Consequentialist Theories It is common for us to determine our moral responsibility by weighing the consequences of our actions. Three subdivisions of consequentialism emerge: Ethical Egoism : an action is morally right if the consequences of that action are more favorable than unfavorable only to the agent performing the action.
Ethical Altruism: an action is morally right if the consequences of that action are more favorable than unfavorable to everyone except the agent. Utilitarianism: an action is morally right if the consequences of that action are more favorable than unfavorable to everyone. Types of Utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham presented one of the earliest fully developed systems of utilitarianism. Applied Ethics Applied ethics is the branch of ethics which consists of the analysis of specific, controversial moral issues such as abortion, animal rights, or euthanasia.
Normative Principles in Applied Ethics Arriving at a short list of representative normative principles is itself a challenging task.
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