Lesson 8

Lesson 8: Ethics, Part I Introduction

 

Quite simply, ethics, also known as "moral philosophy" is the study of right and wrong. What makes a certain act moral? Is it the intent? The outcome? The act itself? Or some part of each? This lesson will discuss the basic nature of ethics, including the specialized concepts unique to the field.

 

What is Ethics?

            In everyday life, the terms "ethics" and "ethical" are used quite commonly to refer to someone or some organization. For example "Tom's an ethical administrator" or "XYZ Corp has poor ethics." Those hearing such statements assume that everyone has the same idea of what these terms mean. However, an inquiry into philosophical ethics will reveal that there are many different standards for ethics and ethical (or moral) behavior.

            Thus, for the purposes of this lesson, the word "ethics" will be defined as "...that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions (Dictionary.com 2011)." Put another way, ethics provides an objective set of standards by which motives, behaviors, and outcomes are valued by a given individual or society.

            The following sections outline some of the basic concepts related to ethical thought.

 

Thinking Ethically

            Before looking at the various major ethical schools of thought, it is important to understand a few ethics-related concepts first. Most modern philosophers divide the study of ethics into three distinct areas: metaethics, prescriptive, and applied.

            Metaethics (sometimes called "descriptive" ethics) discusses where ethical standards come from and what behaviors are taking place for the purposes of comparison and contrast. This is not an ethical standard in and of itself, but relates to a disconnected, objective evaluation of the field of ethics as a whole.

            Prescriptive and applied ethics comprise what is known as normative ethics. Normative ethics proposes some sort of ethical standard (or "norm") by which human or societal behaviors can be judged. It prescribes what good and moral people ought to be doing. Applied ethics assumes the prescribed ethical model (whichever it may be) and attempts to find the best way to implement it within society.

            It is also important to consider that, for the purposes of ethics, each human action can be divided into three separate phases: the intent, the act itself, and the result. Most ethical schools focus only on one of these aspects, such as the result, before evaluating whether or not the action was good or moral. Other schools focus on the beginning or the intent and ignore the consequences, and so on.

 

Metaphysics and Ethics: What's the Connection?

            As one might surmise, metaphysics has a great deal of impact on the field of ethics. That is, someone who believes in an other-worldly standard of objective morality may have a vastly different standard for moral behavior than those who believe that mankind is the final authority in the universe and that ethical judgments are valid on a subjective basis. That is, theistic or dualistic metaphysics would generate a completely different set of ethics than naturalist, materialist, or humanist philosophies would.

            One of the concepts that is important to understand before looking into ethics are a person's metaphysics. Basically, most metaphysics can be placed into one of two broad categories: objectivism and relativism. Most ethical theories hinge on one or the other of these two radically opposed views of the nature of the universe itself.

            Objectivism is the more other-worldly metaphysical view, contending

"…that moral values are objective in the sense that they exist in a spirit-like realm beyond subjective human conventions. They also hold that they are absolute, or eternal, in that they never change, and also that they are universal insofar as they apply to all rational creatures around the world and throughout time. The most dramatic example of this view is Plato, who was inspired by the field of mathematics. When we look at numbers and mathematical relations, such as 1+1=2, they seem to be timeless concepts that never change, and apply everywhere in the universe (IEP 2011)."

            Relativism, on the other hand, focuses more on the physical world as we know it (i.e., it is more "this-worldly"), claiming

           

"[m]oral values … are strictly human inventions, a position that has since been called moral relativism. There are two distinct forms of moral relativism. The first is individual relativism, which holds that individual people create their own moral standards. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, argued that the superhuman creates his or her morality distinct from and in reaction to the slave-like value system of the masses. The second is cultural relativism which maintains that morality is grounded in the approval of one's society – and not simply in the preferences of individual people (IEP 2011)."  

 

Applied Ethics & You

            Applied ethics takes a specific moral issue or set of issues and examines them in the context of various ethical models. There are two primary requirements for any given issue to be considered a matter for applied ethics: "...the issue needs to be controversial in the sense that there are significant groups of people both for and against the issue at hand (IEP, 2011);" and second, the issue "… must be a distinctly moral issue (IEP 2011)."

            For example, issues such as abortion or euthanasia would qualify as applied ethics issues. Each one of these issues has a great number of people for them and against them and they are highly controversial in modern society. Thus, they meet the first criterion, above. Second, both abortion and euthanasia constitute moral issues because the involve life and its termination (or lack thereof).

            These criteria are useful because they rule out issues that are not controversial (such as suicide bombings, which are nearly universally condemned), nor related to morality in any way (such as gun control, which is a political and legal issue rather than one related to ethics).