Draft:Ethics
[gL.edu] This article gathers contributions being developed by Maialen Mendizabal Arocena, Maria Olaizola Jauregui and Maria Sayago, within the context of the Conceptual clarification about "Information, Knowledge and Philosophy", under the supervisión of J.M. Díaz Nafría.
Teacher's Comments: This article requires the corrections indicated below:
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"Contribution by: Maria Olaizola, Maria Sayago and Maialen Mendizabal"
Ethics can be understood “a discipline of philosophy that studies human behavior and its relationship with notions of good and evil, moral precepts, duty, happiness and common well-being.”
The writer Alain Badiou also defines it as: “Ethics concerns, in Greek, the search for a good “way of being” or the wisdom of action (...) ethics is a part of philosophy, which provides for practical existence according to the representation of Good”.
So basically, we can say that Ethics examines what it is to say that we ought to do something, for something to be right or wrong; political philosophy studies the right way to organise society, if it should be organised at all. Questions about whether we should be concerned only with the consequences of our actions, questions about rights, or the nature of justice come under this heading.
The value of ethics lies in its power to give every human being the capacity to have and defend different rights: right to life, right not to be damaged, etc.
Still, there is another moral philosophy that is more abstract, which is called metaethics. This includes notoriously intractable questions about the objectivity of moral claims and the nature of moral discourse, for example: when we say that some moral question can´t be “true” or “false” we are making a metaethical call.
The branches of ethics are different, among them we can distinguish the following: Meta-ethics, ethics that studies theories and analyzes them according to the understanding of morality, duty and virtue that shapes human behavior (what is good, happiness…);Normative or deontological ethics: its function is to establish norms and guidelines of behavior for the common interest (such as treating people, what is considered to be right to avoid doing evil); Applied ethics, ethics that analyzes how the rules of ethics should be applied in different contexts (“environmental ethics”, “communicational ethics” etc. ).
Ethics is linked to morality (norms adopted by the tradition of a particular society) and that is why often in the “common language” it is said that the function of ethics is to create systems of values and guide human behavior towards good, when in reality this is a discipline that reflects on what actions would be correct.
The study of human behavior was the reason or basis for the beginning to develop the history of ethics and morality. In ancient Greece, some philosophers began to wonder what was really good, wrong, right or wrong. Thus, in the beginning, it was concluded that what was truly good was what benefited the community.
The father of ethics is considered Socrates, whose thought makes the notion of good. Ethics as a discipline is born with his work Ethics for Nicómaco. In this work his most relevant ethical reflections appear, such as: what is happiness and how it can be achieved.
Ethics is linked to morality in the professional sphere because in this it is very common that the duty of the profession to the morality of each individual comes into conflict.
Moral Relativism “ is the doctrine that there is no one true moral system, binding on all people at all times”. Relativists think that moral systems change according to space and time, for example: today, child exploitation is seen morally incorrect, but in the 19th century, children worked in factories and that was not seen poorly. According to these, there is no “evil” or “good”, but cultures that give different meanings to actions. It is for this reason, according to them, that there should be no universal or transcultural morality, but that this would suppress some beliefs about others.
Some relativists criticize the notion of morality that is sublebed to most beliefs: that of the West. The human rights known worldwide are based on the right of the individ. This right comes from Enlightenment when the human was in the middle of life. That is why the understanding of the morality of being an individual is part of Western culture. In short, relativist authors bring to light the idea of questioning our beliefs as if they were the only valid ones or as the only ways to do things right.
Unlike relativism, we have tolerance. Toleration is not something we extend to things we approve of or are indifferent to, rather, we extend it to what we disapprove of. This creates a dissonance with realitivism, as if the idea of relativism were entirely correct: everyone would deduce to be tolerant. But this assertion, unintentionally, ceases to enter into a universal morality that everyone should follow.
“Cultural Diversity” is the idea that defense moral relativity. The only premise and the final conclusion is that “no society’s beliefs about right and wrong are better than any other’s”. It has been written that behind any relativist assertion there is a moral global scepticism about any objective or rational thought.Thus, the position of relativists is almost indestructible, since any argument against relativism can not be accepted based on its own principle that everything is questionable, because nothing can be right or wrong; only different understandings: “without argument, the stance that argument is impossible, is itself a way of begging the question”.
References
De Enciclopedia Significados, E. (2023, 16 noviembre). Ética (Qué es, concepto, tipos y ramas). Significados. https://www.significados.com/etica/