Ethical Issues in Modern Society

Applied Ethical Issues

• Classified into various subfields, including Bioethics, Environmental Ethics, Business Ethics, Sexual Ethics, Social Ethics, Virtue Ethics, and Normative Ethics.

Bioethics

• Concerns ethical issues about life, biomedical research, medicines, health care, and the medical profession.

Environmental Ethics

• Deals with moral issues concerning nature, ecosystem, and its nonhuman contents, including animal rights, animal experimentation, endangered species preservation, pollution control, and sustainable development.

Business Ethics

• Examines moral principles concerning the business environment, including corporate practices, policies, business behaviors, and the conducts and relationships of individuals in organizations.

Sexual Ethics

• Studies moral issues about sexuality and human sexual behavior, including topics like homosexuality, lesbianism, polygamy, pre-marital sex, marital fidelity, extra-marital sex, non-marital procreation, loveless sexual relations, safe sex, and contraceptive use.

Social Ethics

• Deals with what is right for a society to do and how it should act as a whole, focusing on proper behavior for people as a whole, including issues like racial discrimination, death penalty, nuclear weapon production, gun control, drug use for fun, and welfare rights.

Virtue Ethics

• Teaches that an action is right if it is an action that a virtuous person would perform in the same situation, emphasizing developing good habits of character and avoiding bad character traits.

Normative Ethics

• Studies how man ought to act, morally speaking, examining ethical norms, guidelines for what is right, worthwhile, virtuous, or just, and evaluating standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions.

Classifications of Normative Ethical Theories

• Deontology: bases morality on independent moral rules or duties, emphasizing the foundational nature of man's duties or obligations.
• Teleology: determines the moral value of actions by their outcomes or results, taking into account the result of the action as the exclusive consideration of its morality.
• Virtue Ethics: emphasizes developing good habits of character, like kindness and generosity, and avoiding bad character traits, or vices, such as greed or hatred.

Applied Ethics

• Philosophically examines specific, controversial moral issues, attempting to determine the ethically correct course of action in specific realms of human action.

Ethics Reviewer Meta-ethics

• Studies the nature of morality, including the meaning, reference, and truth values of moral judgments, and explaining what goodness and wickedness mean and how we know about them.

Cognitivism vs. Non-cognitivism

• Cognitivism: states that moral judgments convey propositions, that is, they are 'truth bearers,' or they are either true or false.
• Moral Realism: claims that the existence of moral facts and the truth (or falsity) of moral judgments are independent of people's thoughts and perceptions.
• Ethical Subjectivism: holds that the truth (or falsity) of ethical propositions are dependent on the attitudes or standards of a person or group of persons.
• Non-cognitivism: denies that moral judgments are either true or false, claiming that ethical sentences do not convey authentic propositions, hence are neither true nor false.
• Emotivism: submits that moral judgments are mere expressions of our emotions and feelings, and cannot be said to be either true or false according to the theory.

This quiz covers the different subfields of applied ethics, including bioethics, environmental ethics, and business ethics. It explores the moral principles and dilemmas in various aspects of life, such as biomedical research, animal rights, and sustainable development.