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. Some religious doctrines are also fairly unclear about what constitutes moral and immoral behavior. In some cases, early passages in certain texts prohibit a behavior that is later endorsed or vice-versa.
Additionally, acts which some religious texts condemn have become morally acceptable in mainstream society. For example, the Old Testament book of Leviticus contains a myriad of laws e. The unclear ethical degrees of various deities raise a significant problem for those who wish to reconcile morality and self-interest through divine rewards or punishments. Even if one accepts the truth of a particular religion and wishes to act morally in order to avoid punishment in the afterlife, the lack of clarity on what constitutes moral behavior could cause the individual to behave immorally due to sheer confusion.
In his conversation with Euthyphro, Socrates asks one of the most famous questions in the history of philosophy: is an action pious because the gods command it, or do the gods command the action because it is pious? Good may be used to refer to anything — it is a general term that expresses positive value about something or assigns positive value to something. Nevertheless, in philosophy the term takes on special meaning and that meaning is particularly related to ethics.
Regardless of how one replies to the question, the answer reveals substantial concerns about Divine Command Theory. If an action is good because God commands it, then morality becomes an arbitrary doctrine.
On this view, telling the truth is considered morally good if God commands it, but telling lies is also considered morally good if God commands it. When an action and its opposite can both be considered morally good, morality becomes arbitrary: depending on what God commands, any action could be moral or immoral regardless of its nature or consequences. In order for the concept of goodness to be meaningful, God must have some reason for commanding certain actions and forbidding others.
Now we should consider what happens if we respond to the Euthyphro dilemma in the opposite way: suppose God commands certain actions because they are good. This answer avoids the undesirable outcomes of the other but has a fundamental problem of its own. If God commands certain actions because they are good, this implies that God has a meaningful rather than arbitrary reason for making these commands.
Hence, when we ask why God commands us to do something, there will underlying ethical principles that provide the basis for the command. Instead, morality is based on the principles that underlie the commands, and these principles exist independent of God. Regrettably, these observations have devastating implications for reconciling morality and self-interest.
If ethics encompasses principles which mandate behavior beyond the scope of what God wants or does not want us to do, how do we justify acting morally in situations that God has not clearly addressed to our best understanding where our self-interest is compromised? However, there is perhaps an even greater flaw in attempts to reconcile morality and self-interest through an appeal to otherworldly rewards and punishments.
Typically, God is considered all-knowing. Is moral behavior valuable when motivated purely by self-interest in avoiding punishment in the afterlife?
In the first sense, guilt is simply the state of having done something wrong. We might say, for example, that a person is guilty of wrongdoing if he has committed a robbery. Thus, although we may judge the robber to be guilty of wrongdoing quite apart from any legal context, we may also find the robber guilty of wrongdoing in a court of law.
However, Kavka makes a troubling concession: he does not believe that immoralists —those dedicated to living immorally when moral behavior seems to be a disadvantage to them—can be persuaded to behave morally through rational argument. He thinks that those unwilling or unable to see and experience the benefits of living morally will remain unconvinced. David Gauthier proposes a different type of reconciliation. Morality as a system benefits everyone because the overall advantages gained e.
In other words, one can only defend the choice to act morally using moral reasons and the choice to promote self-interest using prudential reasons. The pivotal consideration, according to Taylor, regards how an individual wishes to define her identity. The choice about whether we wish to be a supremely moral or supremely self-interested person is essentially arbitrary, but it is also overwhelmingly important.
In making this ultimate choice, a person is making a decision about the type of person he or she wishes to be, thereby shaping her personal identity. Once we are aware that morality is based on a choice about what type of person we want to be, we might find it too easy to choose to be an immoral person. Nielsen reminds us that people do not typically become moral or immoral based on philosophical discussion and reflection:. Unless a man is already ready to run amok, he will not be morally derailed by the recognition that in deliberating about how to act one finally must simply decide what sort of a person one wishes to be.
Taylor does provide a means for moralists to demonstrate how acting morally is a rational component of their worldviews because acting morally contributes to a moralist being the type of person she wants to be , but it will not suffice to convince an immoralist, who presumably wants to be a purely self-interested person, that she should change her view of who she wants to be.
Of course, at this point, we might wonder just what it will take to convince an immoralist that her position is mistaken. We must consider the possibility that no answer we can offer will suffice to persuade her. But perhaps this outcome is not one that should bother us. When I choose to keep a promise, am I really keeping it only because in some way I will be worse off if I fail to keep it?
And if keeping a promise is against my self-interest, does that suddenly mean that this moral obligation no longer binds me? Moral obligations are generally considered binding on us even if they clearly conflict with our self-interests. We adhere to what morality demands because it is the right thing to do, not because we are somehow better off for doing so.
Terry Lovat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Certain customs or behaviours are recognised as good and others as bad , and these collectively comprise morality — arguably the summation of our value system as human beings.
So a conversation about ethical and moral decision-making is important. The words derive respectively from the word in Greek ethos, ethikos and Latin mores, moralis , variously translated as customs, manners or social norms. In fact, however, it is possible to differentiate the Greek root of ethics from the Latin root of morality in a way that may be practically helpful. Put another way, ethics is a more individual assessment of values as relatively good or bad, while morality is a more intersubjective community assessment of what is good, right or just for all.
In approaching such a question, the individual ethical answer can be limited by its essential egotism. Since recognition of others is implicit to moral questions, according to the distinction made above, moral questions can and must be answered universally.
This requires having a shared dialogue — precisely since these questions deal with good, right, and justice for all. Put another way, moral decision-making relocates ethical decision-making away from an individualistic reflection on imperatives, utility or virtue, into a social space.
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