Ethics and Morality (original) (raw)
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Theories of ethics, rules, and principles
2021
By definition, bioethics studies the moral behavior of individuals through various ethical methodologies. Ethics as science is called to show how one can judge what makes a human behavior morally correct. Ethical rules, which are the broadest term in ethical action at any time as an individual, judge what is right and what is not. Ethical rules are very general and one ethical rule can be applied to several cases which can lead to a misunderstanding of a particular rule. Ethical principles as a stricter tool of ethical judgment are still very general but more defined and classified. Therefore, many philosophers believe that moral rules and principles must be applied universally and that they should apply equally to all individuals of society, except when the moral basis of two cases to which the same rules and principles apply differs. So, there are 4 ethical principles, and these are autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. The principles must be always followed by health professionals, so the patient's will to decide his own destiny must not be violated, i.e., autonomy must not be violated. According to the principles of charity and harmlessness, the medical worker should always conscientiously judge the final outcomes, which must be positive for the patient. In doing so, according to the Principle of Equity, all patients must have an equal opportunity to receive appropriate health care. At the end of the ethical theory are those according to which the morality of the actions performed by the individual will be assessed. The theory of virtues will analyze the virtues that an individual needs to possess to act ethically and following ethical principles. Deontological theories assess the duty of actions performed by an individual, and consequentialist theories will judge the correctness or incorrectness of actions performed by an individual, according to the consequences of certain actions. The most well-known consequentialist theory, utilitarianism, defines that good is what produces the greatest happiness and benefit for most individuals. No ethical rules or principles must be violated in all actions carried out for the ultimate goal of charity.
The ethical code of conduct can be ideally defined as the spiritual and the ideological foundation of a given human society. This concept helps the individuals comprehend their fellow human beings and the surrounding environment and then use this information to take the adequate decisions. The success of any human society has been attributed to the overall ideological and ethical beliefs, as they contribute in the development of the majority of the societal norms and the rules. The most significant factor regarding the concept of ethics is based on the relativity factor, and the different interpretations of ethics found in the major global societies.
TWO (2) MAJOR CLASSIFICATIONS OF ETHICAL THEORIES.
SCHOOL OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES FACULTY OF COMMUNICATION DEPARTMENT OF MASS COMMUNICATION BAYERO UNIVERSITY, KANO (ASSIGNMENT), 2021
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that involves questions about morality and the perception of good and evil, of right and wrong, of justice, virtue, and vice. It has the following branches: meta-ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, moral psychology, and descriptive ethics. These branches have several different schools of thought and subfields, among them are: hedonism, Epicureanism, stoicism, modern ethics, applied ethics, moral psychology, deontology, and teleology or consequentialism. In contemporary moral psychology, evolutionary biology has taken the lead. Prescriptive, or normative ethical theories, explain, or justify, why certain acts ought to be considered right or wrong. If there is anything “easy” about studying ethics it’s fact that there are only two kinds of prescriptive ethical (moral) theories: teleological and deontological theories. Therefore, the focus of this work will be to elaborately discuss the two major classifications of ethical theories (teleological and deontological theories) and at the end adopt a specific ethical approach with substantial reasons to backing it up as a journalist or media practitioner.
Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society
Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with morality. Ethicists are concerned with a wide range of topics, such as human nature, the meaning of life, the nature of value, how judgments are made, how judgments can be improved, how moral attitudes arise or change, and the workings of morally significant mental states such as love, hate, greed, envy, indifference, pity, desire, aversion, pleasure and pain. Moral or ethical theories offer means of understanding significant elements in these and other areas of inquiry. Ethical theories tend either toward merely describing, or toward both describing and judging. As a result, some moral theories seem to belong to anthropology, psychology or sociology, while others look like instances of what ethics purports to study, that is, like moral doctrines or judgments. For this reason, a major distinction employed by moral theorists distinguishes descriptive from prescriptive, or normative, theories, or elements of theories. Moral judgments tend to state either that something is good or bad, or that something agrees or conflicts with our obligations. Consequently, a major division in moral theories is between theories of value (axiology) and theories of obligation (deontology). In each area, ethicists want to determine the meaning of moral judgments, their truth or falsity, their objectivity or subjectivity, how judgments are made, how they can be tested, how they can be justified, and the possibility of organizing judgments under first principles. A third major distinction places theories about the meaning of moral judgments in a category of their own called metaethics. Obviously, metaethical questions arise in all areas of ethics. Prescriptive or normative moral thinking recommends at least one moral evaluation, or else it attempts the same for at least one moral obligation. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans and Cynics sought both to find the best kind of life, and to strongly recommend the judgment that it was in fact the best. Others, such as Immanuel Kant, attempted to describe the nature of obligation, but also provided grounds for justifying or recommending certain obligations. The theories of David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Darwinism and Logical Positivism exemplify the tendency to separate the task of description from that of prescription, or to eschew prescription altogether, in order to describe and organize moral judgments for the sake of understanding alone. Unwavering pursuit of the metaethical question of the meaning of moral judgments brought many recent philosophers to the conclusion that moral judgments are not the sort of statements that can be true or false, but instead express resolutions, preferences, feelings, demands or other states of mind. Hume thought they reported subjective feelings, so that a judgment, for example 'insider trading is immoral,' would not be understood as ascribing a predicate to insider trading, but as saying something like 'I disapprove of that act.' A. J. Ayer, a Logical Positivist, believed that moral judgments did not report feelings, but merely expressed them. For him, the statement 'insider trading is immoral' merely expresses a negative emotional reactionalong the lines of 'boo insider trading!'. Such expressions are neither true nor false because they do not describe anything. Hume and Ayer represent the school known as Emotivism. A neighboring school, Prescriptivism, interprets 'insider trading is immoral' as an