MORAL PHILOSOPHY 

Ethics, also called moral philosophy, the discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad and morally right and wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles.

How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? And what of the more particular questions that face us: is it right to be dishonest in a good cause? Can we justify living in opulence while elsewhere in the world people are starving? Is going to war justified in cases where it is likely that innocent people will be killed? Is it wrong to clone a human being or to destroy human embryos in medical research? What are our obligations, if any, to the generations of humans who will come after us and to the nonhuman animals with whom we share the planet?

Ethics deals with such questions at all levels. Its subject consists of the fundamental issues of practical decision making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong.

The terms ethics and morality are closely related. It is now common to refer to ethical judgments or to ethical principles where it once would have been more accurate to speak of moral judgments or moral principles. These applications are an extension of the meaning of ethics. In earlier usage, the term referred not to morality itself but to the field of study, or branch of inquiry, that has morality as its subject matter. In this sense, ethics is equivalent to moral philosophy.

Although ethics has always been viewed as a branch of philosophy, its all-embracing practical nature links it with many other areas of study, including anthropology, biology, economics, history, politics, sociology, and theology. Yet, ethics remains distinct from such disciplines because it is not a matter of factual knowledge in the way that the sciences and other branches of inquiry are. Rather, it has to do with determining the nature of normative theories and applying these sets of principles to practical moral problems.

WHAT ETHICS IS AND NOT 

Ethics is all about actions and decisions. We face many challenges in life and the way we handle them speaks volumes about our character. In the end, our character embodies our values and is the sum of our behaviors.

Values are basic and fundamental beliefs that guide or motivate attitudes or actions. Some values are ethical because they are universally accepted: honesty, trustworthiness, kindness, responsibility, and so on. Others are non-ethical; they pertain to individual desires but not universal ones: wealth, power, fame and prestige.

Ethics is about creating an environment that supports the expression of ethical values while keeping in check non-ethical values. This doesn’t mean the pursuit of non-ethical values is wrong. It simply means we should not allow them to rule our lives because it can lead to greedy, self-centered behavior without regard for others.

Ethics is not what we think or feel is right or wrong. Ethics is not relative to an individual’s desires and beliefs. Ethical relativism means each individual decides what is right and what is wrong in a particular circumstance. But, how can this be? If ethics was relative or situational, then one person might decide stealing is right to do when the theft is to right a perceive wrong while another might say stealing is always wrong because someone is taking something from someone else that doesn’t belong to him or her.