Task 2

Ethics and Moral Judgement

Lekshmi T
Research Scholar
Table of Contents
• Introduction to Ethics
• Ethics and Morality
• Divisions of Moral Philosophy/Ethics
• Meta-ethics
• Normative ethics
• Applied ethics
• Moral Judgement
• Nature of Moral Judgement
• Objectivism
• Relativism
• Emotivism
Ethics: An Introduction
• Ethics - ‘the branch of philosophy that studies what constitutes right
and wrong.’
• All ethical questions involve a decision about what one should or
ought to do in a specific instance.
• Ethics: As a philosophical discipline of study is a systematic approach
to understanding, analysing and distinguishing matters of write and
wrong.
• Morals : the conduct or rule of conduct by which people live.
• One’s morals are judged as good or bad through systematic ethical
analysis.
• The word “ethics” - the Greek “ethos,” -“character” or “the custom or
the way of life.”
Ethics
• Ethics: norms for conduct that distinguish between acceptable and
unacceptable behavior.
• The acceptable and unacceptable behaviour -justified with logical,
theoretical based arguments.
• Ethics covers the following dilemmas:
• the language of right and wrong
• moral decisions - what is good and bad?
• What is just and what is unjust?
• What humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits
to society, fairness, or specific virtues.
• Our concepts of ethics -derived from religions, philosophies and cultures.
• Ethics is often called as Moral Philosophy.
Ethics and Morality
• Ethics : used in connection with the activities of organizations
and with professional codes of conduct.
Eg: Medical Ethics, Business ethics
• Morality used in connection with the ways in which individuals
conduct their personal, private lives, often in relation to
personal.
• Morality is the orientation of the individual towards what is
good or bad what is just unjust.
Divisions of Moral Philosophy/Ethics
• Meta-ethics
deals with the origin of the ethical concepts themselves.
• Normative ethics
deals with “norms” or set of considerations how one should act.
• Applied ethics
deals with the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint,
of particular issues in private and public life.
Meta-ethics
• Branch of ethics-investigates where the ethical principles come from
and what they mean.
• Meta-ethics -the attempt to answer the fundamental philosophical
questions about the nature of ethical theory itself.
• Meta ethics goes into the morality of ethical claims.
• How we know if some thing stated in ethics is good or not?
• Examples: Are ethical statements such as "lying is wrong", or
"friendship is good" true or false?
Normative ethics
• Branch of ethics that makes judgements about obligation
and value.
• Concerned with the principles by which we ought to live.
• Includes the formulation of moral rules that have
direct implications for what human actions, institutions, and
ways of life should be like.
Eg: Murder is wrong.
Applied ethics

• Branch of ethics -Deals with difficult and controversial moral

issues that people actually face in their private and public
lives.
• Examples: the moral issues regarding… euthanasia, the death
penalty etc.
• Concerns what a person is required to or permitted to do in a
specific situation.
Moral Judgement
• Evaluation or judgement as to whether an action, intention
or a person is good or bad against some standard of good.
• Moral Judgement:- Normative.
• A judgment of values.
• Conclusion that a person reaches about the ethical quality of
something or someone. 
• Eg: Giving Charity is good.
 Moral judgement
Reactions
• When an action is judged correct- a moral obligation to perform it and
there is a feeling of approval.
• When action is judged to be wrong-moral obligation not to perform it
and there is a feeling of disapproval.
• Feeling of approval, disapproval, rightness, wrongness ,feeling of
satisfaction, remorse, regret etc. are called moral sentiments
• Moral judgments -accompanied by moral obligation and moral
sentiments.
Nature of Moral Judgements
• Active in nature, not upon their passive experiences.
• Social in character- voluntary acts of a person which affect the
interest of others
• Moral judgment, apart from society is not possible.
• Moral judgements can be abstract in nature
• eg: An action is right so far as it maximises our overall happiness.
• Moral judgements in some situations- true or false objectively but in
some other cases relatively with respect to a culture , person or
sensibility.
Moral Judgement- Three theories
Objectivism
• Moral judgments -true or false independent of who we are or what cultural
groups we belong to.
• Based on objective moral facts.
• Example: genocide is morally abhorrent. This is true for any culture or people.
Relativism
• Moral judgments -true or false but the truth or falsity of moral judgment is only
relative to something that can vary from person to person or culture to culture.
• “People from different cultures don’t see the world differently, but they think
differently about what they see.”
• Example: Polygamy is morally wrong.
• Relativism- subjective or cultural.
Moral Judgement- Three theories
Emotivism
• Moral judgements -neither objectively true or
false nor relatively true or false but they are
direct expressions of our emotive reactions.
• Direct expressions of our emotions.
• It is the expression of our attitude towards
something.