WHAT IS ETHICS

What is Ethics?

ETHICS

At its simplest, ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their lives.
Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral philosophy.
The term is derived from the Greek word ethos which can mean custom, habit, character or disposition.

Ethics covers the following dilemmas:

• how to live a good life
• our rights and responsibilities
• the language of right and wrong
• moral decisions - what is good and bad?
Our concepts of ethics have been derived from religions, philosophies and cultures. They infuse debates on topics like abortion, human rights and professional conduct.

Approaches to ethics

Philosophers nowadays tend to divide ethical theories into three areas: metaethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.
• Meta-ethics deals with the nature of moral judgement. It looks at the origins and meaning of ethical principles.
• Normative ethics is concerned with the content of moral judgements and the criteria for what is right or wrong.
• Applied ethics looks at controversial topics like war, animal rights and capital punishment

What use is ethics?

If ethical theories are to be useful in practice, they need to affect the way human beings behave.
Some philosophers think that ethics does do this. They argue that if a person realises that it would be morally good to do something then it would be irrational for that person not to do it.
But human beings often behave irrationally - they follow their 'gut instinct' even when their head suggests a different course of action.
However, ethics does provide good tools for thinking about moral issues.

Ethics can provide a moral map

Most moral issues get us pretty worked up - think of abortion and euthanasia for starters. Because these are such emotional issues we often let our hearts do the arguing while our brains just go with the flow.
But there's another way of tackling these issues, and that's where philosophers can come in - they offer us ethical rules and principles that enable us to take a cooler view of moral problems.
So ethics provides us with a moral map, a framework that we can use to find our way through difficult issues.

Ethics can pinpoint a disagreement

Using the framework of ethics, two people who are arguing a moral issue can often find that what they disagree about is just one particular part of the issue, and that they broadly agree on everything else.
That can take a lot of heat out of the argument, and sometimes even hint at a way for them to resolve their problem.
But sometimes ethics doesn't provide people with the sort of help that they really want.

Ethics doesn't give right answers

Ethics doesn't always show the right answer to moral problems.
Indeed more and more people think that for many ethical issues there isn't a single right answer - just a set of principles that can be applied to particular cases to give those involved some clear choices.
Some philosophers go further and say that all ethics can do is eliminate confusion and clarify the issues. After that it's up to each individual to come to their own conclusions.

Good people as well as good actions

Ethics is not only about the morality of particular courses of action, but it's also about the goodness of individuals and what it means to live a good life.
Virtue Ethics is particularly concerned with the moral character of human beings.

Searching for the source of right and wrong

At times in the past some people thought that ethical problems could be solved in one of two ways:
• by discovering what God wanted people to do
• by thinking rigorously about moral principles and problems
If a person did this properly they would be led to the right conclusion.
But now even philosophers are less sure that it's possible to devise a satisfactory and complete theory of ethics - at least not one that leads to conclusions.

Modern thinkers often teach that ethics leads people not to conclusions but to 'decisions'.
In this view, the role of ethics is limited to clarifying 'what's at stake' in particular ethical problems.
Philosophy can help identify the range of ethical methods, conversations and value systems that can be applied to a particular problem. But after these things have been made clear, each person must make their own individual decision as to what to do, and then react appropriately to the consequences.

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