Ethics Fundamentals

Ethics: Valuation and Value of Judgments

• Ethics deals with what is acceptable and unacceptable in human behavior, focusing on good and bad things that we should pursue or avoid.
• Aesthetics involves personal approval or disapproval judgments about what we see, hear, smell, or taste.
• Etiquette is concerned with right and wrong actions.
• Technique refers to a proper way of doing things, derived from the Greek word "techne".

Morals and Ethics

• Morals refer to specific beliefs, attitudes, or acts, while ethics is the discipline of studying and understanding ideal human behavior and thinking.
• Ethics tends to refer to the philosophy or study, whereas morals focus on acts and thoughts.

Descriptive vs Normative Ethics

• Descriptive ethics reports on how people make moral valuations without making judgments for or against these valuations.
• Normative ethics prescribes what we ought to maintain as our standards.

Four Levels of Moral Understanding:

• Moral decisions: confronting choices of what moral actions to perform.
• Moral judgment: assessing actions or behaviors of others.
• Moral dilemma: deciding between two moral goods or the lesser of two moral evils.
• Moral issue: any issue that concerns ethics.

Reasoning

• Fear of punishment and desire for reward can motivate us to act, but they are not determinants of rightness or wrongness.
• Moral valuation can be based on principles beyond rewards and punishments.
• Principles are rationally established grounds for justifying and maintaining moral decisions and judgments.

Moral Theory

• A moral theory is a systematic attempt of thought or ideas, providing a framework for evaluating reasons behind valuing certain decisions or judgments.

Source of Authority

• Law serves as a guide to ethical behavior, providing an objective standard that is obligatory and applicable to all.
• Positive law refers to the rules and regulations put forward by an authority figure that require compliance.

Law and Ethics

• The law constrains us from performing acts that we should not do, rather than telling us what to pursue.
• The law cannot tell us what to pursue, only what to avoid.

Religion and Ethics

• Taking religion as a basis of ethics provides a set of commands and a Supreme Authority that can inspire and compel obedience.
• Euthyphro's idea: what is holy is loved by the gods, but is it holy because it is loved by the gods, or is it holy in itself?

Culture Relativism

• What is ethically acceptable or unacceptable is relative to one's culture.
• Cultural relativism acknowledges that there are no universal standards of right and wrong, and that we are in no position to judge other cultures or even our own.