An Overview of Ethics

What is ‘philosophy’?

What do you think philosophers do?

How do they spend their time?

As human beings live their lives, they acquire a wealth of information about the world around them that
they use to build up a collection of ideas about the world and their place within it.

Those ideas come from a variety of sources. They may come from scientific discoveries, personal
experience, traditional beliefs commonly held by people in the society in which they live, and so on.

Much of the time people accept those ideas without questioning them; they are relatively
‘unconsidered’ or ‘unexamined’.

A philosopher, however, will attempt to scrutinize such ideas about the world to see if they are based on
sound evidence.

Instead of having a collection of unorganized beliefs and opinions that may be incoherent and self-
contradictory, the philosopher believes that a person’s views should be carefully considered and
organized into a coherent, meaningful, rationally defensible system.

“ Philosophy is the study of the ultimate nature of existence, reality, knowledge and goodness, as
discoverable by human reasoning. ”

What is ‘ethics’?

Are you the type of person who usually ‘does the right thing’? How do you know what the ‘right thing’ is?

“Ethics is the branch of philosophical study that is concerned with studying and/or building up a
coherent/logical/rational set of ‘rules’ or principles by which people ought to live. “

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that seeks to determine how one ought to act in a particular situation.
That is to say, it focuses on how one might be able to determine right or good action in any given
situation.

Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right
and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. As a field of intellectual enquiry, moral philosophy also is
related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory.

The four main branches of ethics include descriptive ethics, normative ethics, meta-ethics and applied
ethics.

1. Descriptive Ethics:

Descriptive ethics deals with what people actually believe (or made to believe) to be right or wrong,
and accordingly holds up the human actions acceptable or not acceptable or punishable under a custom
or law.
 However, customs and laws keep changing from time to time and from society to society. The
societies have structured their moral principles as per changing time and have expected people to
behave accordingly.

Due to this, descriptive ethics is also called comparative ethics because it compares the ethics or past
and present; ethics of one society and other.

2. Normative Ethics

Normative Ethics deals with “norms” or set of considerations that specifies, how one should act.
Thus, it’s a study of “ethical action” and sets out the rightness or wrongness of the actions.

It is also called prescriptive ethics because it rests on the principles which determine whether an
action is right or wrong.

The Golden rule of normative ethics is “doing to other as we want them to do to us“

e.g. Since we don’t want our neighbors to throw stones through our glass window, then it will not be
wise to first throw stone through a neighbor’s window.

Based on this reasoning, anything such as harassing, victimizing, abusing or assaulting someone is
wrong.

Some of the Normative Ethics theories:

Virtue ethics:
Virtue ethics focuses on one’s character and the virtues for determining or evaluating ethical behavior.

Deontological ethics:
Deontological ethics or duty ethics focuses on the rightness and wrongness of the actions rather than
the consequences of those actions.

Some Deontological ethics Theories:

1. Moral absolutism
Famous deontological theory is Moral absolutism. It believes that there are absolute standards
against which moral questions can be judged. Against these standards, certain actions are right
while others are wrong regardless of the context of the act.

For example, theft is wrong, regardless of context in which theft was carried out. It ignores that
sometimes wrong act is done to reach out to right consequence.

2. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative:

It is based on two principles viz. universality and principle of reciprocity. By universality, he
meant that a moral action must be possible to apply it to all people.

By principle of reciprocity, he meant said “do as you would be done by. Such premise of morality
is found in all religious systems

3. Divine command theory

 It says that an action is right if God has decreed it to be right. As per this theory, the rightness of
any action depends upon that action being performed because it is a duty, not because of any
good consequences arising from that action.

Consequentialism (Teleology):

Consequentialism or teleological ethics says that the morality of an action is contingent (has relation)
with the outcome of that action.

So, the morally right action would produce good outcome while morally wrong action would produce
bad outcome.

3. Meta Ethics (Analytical Ethics):

It deals with the origin of the ethical concepts themselves. It does not consider whether an action is
good or bad, right or wrong.

Rather, it questions – what goodness or rightness or morality itself is?

The key theories in meta-ethics include naturalism, non-naturalism, emotivism and prescriptivism.

Naturalists and non-naturalists believe that moral language is cognitive and can be known to be true or
false.

Emotivists deny that moral utterances are cognitive, holding that they consist of emotional expressions
of approval or disapproval and that the nature of moral reasoning.

Prescriptivism is the attitude or belief that one variety of a language is superior to others and should be
promoted as such.

Applied ethics
Applied ethics refers to the practical application of moral considerations. It is
ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in the
areas of private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and
leadership. Applied ethics has following categories:

Bioethics:

Bioethics is the study of the ethical issues emerging from advances in biology
and medicine. It address issues like euthanasia, surrogacy, organ donation,
right to refuse medical care for religious or cultural reasons etc.

Environmental ethics:

Environmental ethics is the part of environmental philosophy which considers

extending the traditional boundaries of ethics from solely including humans to
including the non-human world.
There are many ethical decisions that human beings make with respect to the
environment. For example:

 Should humans continue to clear cut forests for the sake of human

consumption?

 Is it right for humans to knowingly cause the extinction of a species for

the convenience of humanity?

Business Ethics:

The term ‘Business Ethics’ refers to the system of moral principles and rules of
the conduct applied to business. Every profession or group frames certain do’s
and do not’s for its members. The members are given a standard in which they
are supposed to operate.

Business ethics should take into consideration the following factors:

1. A business should aim to have fair dealing with everyone dealing with it.

2. Ethics should be fixed for everyone working in the organisation at any level
and their implementation should be linked with reward- punishment
system.

3. Any violation of ethics should be detected at the earliest and remedial

measures taken immediately.

4. Business ethics should be based on broad guidelines of what should be

done and what should be avoided.

5. The ethics should be based on the perception of what is right.

Professional Ethics:
Professional ethics encompass the personal, and corporate standards of
behavior expected by professionals. Professionally accepted standards of
personal and business behavior, values and guiding principles are called as
Professional ethics. Codes of professional ethics are often established by
professional organizations to help guide members in performing their job
functions according to sound and consistent ethical principles.