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    What Is Ethics

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    Danica
    Ethics is based on standards that prescribe what is right and wrong in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or virtues. However, people have differing views on what ethics means. Some equate it with feelings, religion, following the law, or societal acceptance. But ethics cannot be reduced to any of these alone, as feelings, laws, and societal standards can deviate from what is ethical. To determine what is ethical requires more than just conforming to subjective feelings, religious beliefs, legal standards, or majority opinions.

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    What Is Ethics

    Uploaded by

    Danica
    22 views2 pages
    Ethics is based on standards that prescribe what is right and wrong in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or virtues. However, people have differing views on what ethics means. Some equate it with feelings, religion, following the law, or societal acceptance. But ethics cannot be reduced to any of these alone, as feelings, laws, and societal standards can deviate from what is ethical. To determine what is ethical requires more than just conforming to subjective feelings, religious beliefs, legal standards, or majority opinions.

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    What is Ethics

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    Ethics is based on standards that prescribe what is right and wrong in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or virtues. However, people have differing views on what ethics means. Some equate it with feelings, religion, following the law, or societal acceptance. But ethics cannot be reduced to any of these alone, as feelings, laws, and societal standards can deviate from what is ethical. To determine what is ethical requires more than just conforming to subjective feelings, religious beliefs, legal standards, or majority opinions.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    22 views2 pages

    What Is Ethics

    Uploaded by

    Danica
    Ethics is based on standards that prescribe what is right and wrong in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or virtues. However, people have differing views on what ethics means. Some equate it with feelings, religion, following the law, or societal acceptance. But ethics cannot be reduced to any of these alone, as feelings, laws, and societal standards can deviate from what is ethical. To determine what is ethical requires more than just conforming to subjective feelings, religious beliefs, legal standards, or majority opinions.

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    What is Ethics?

    ​ Home
    ​ Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
    ​ Ethics Resources
    ​ Ethical Decision Making
    ​ What is Ethics?

    Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer

    Ethics is based on well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what
    humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness,
    or specific virtues.

    Some years ago, sociologist Raymond Baumhart asked business people, "What does
    ethics mean to you?" Among their replies were the following:

    "Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong."


    "Ethics has to do with my religious beliefs."
    "Being ethical is doing what the law requires."
    "Ethics consists of the standards of behavior our society accepts."
    "I don't know what the word means."

    These replies might be typical of our own. The meaning of "ethics" is hard to pin down,
    and the views many people have about ethics are shaky.

    Like Baumhart's first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings.
    But being ethical is clearly not a matter of following one's feelings. A person following his
    or her feelings may recoil from doing what is right. In fact, feelings frequently deviate
    from what is ethical.

    Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most religions, of course, advocate high
    ethical standards. Yet if ethics were confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to
    religious people. But ethics applies as much to the behavior of the atheist as to that of
    the devout religious person. Religion can set high ethical standards and can provide
    intense motivations for ethical behavior. Ethics, however, cannot be confined to religion
    nor is it the same as religion.

    Being ethical is also not the same as following the law. The law often incorporates
    ethical standards to which most citizens subscribe. But laws, like feelings, can deviate
    from what is ethical. Our own pre-Civil War slavery laws and the old apartheid laws of
    present-day South Africa are grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from
    what is ethical.

    Finally, being ethical is not the same as doing "whatever society accepts." In any society,
    most people accept standards that are, in fact, ethical. But standards of behavior in
    society can deviate from what is ethical. An entire society can become ethically corrupt.
    Nazi Germany is a good example of a morally corrupt society.

    Moreover, if being ethical were doing "whatever society accepts," then to find out what is
    ethical, one would have to find out what society accepts. To decide what I should think
    about abortion, for example, I would have to take a survey of American society and then
    conform my beliefs to whatever society accepts. But no one ever tries to decide an
    ethical issue by doing a survey. Further, the lack of social consensus on many issues
    makes it impossible to equate ethics with whatever society accepts. Some people accept
    abortion but many others do not. If being ethical were doing whatever society accepts,
    one would have to find an agreement on issues which does not, in fact, exist.

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