UPSC IAS exam preparation - Ethics and Values - Lecture 1

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Essence, determinants and
consequences of Ethics in human actions - Part 1

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1.0 WHAT IS ETHICS?

At its simplest, ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their lives. Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral philosophy.

The term ethics is derived from the Greek word ethos which can mean custom, habit, character or disposition.

• Ethics covers the following dilemmas:

1. How to live a good life?
2. What are our rights and responsibilities?
3. What is right and wrong?
4. Moral decisions - what is good and bad?

Our concepts of ethics have been derived from religions, philosophies and cultures. 

1.1 Approaches to ethics

Philosophers nowadays tend to divide ethical theories into three areas: metaethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.

Metaethics is a branch of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words. Metaethics focuses on what morality itself is. Metaethics is also occasionally referred to as "second-order" moral theorizing, to distinguish it from the "first-order" level of normative theory.

Normative ethics is that part of moral philosophy, or ethics, concerned with criteria of what is morally right and wrong. It includes the formulation of moral rules that have direct implications for what human actions, institutions, and ways of life should be like. 

The central question of normative ethics is determining how basic moral standards are arrived at and justified. The answers to this question fall into two broad categories - deontological and teleological. The principal difference between them is that deontological theories do not appeal to value considerations in establishing ethical standards, while teleological theories do. Deontological theories use the concept of their inherent rightness in establishing such standards, while teleological theories consider the goodness or value brought into being by actions as the principal criterion of their ethical value. In other words, a deontological approach calls for doing certain things on principle or because they are inherently right, whereas a teleological approach advocates that certain kinds of actions are right because of the goodness of their consequences. Deontological theories thus stress the concepts of obligation, duty, and right and wrong, while teleological theories lay stress on the good, the valuable, and the desirable. Deontological theories set forth formal or relational criteria such as equality or impartiality; teleological theories, by contrast, provide material or substantive criteria, as, for example, happiness or pleasure. 

The application of normative theories and standards to practical moral problems is the concern of applied ethics. This subdiscipline of ethics deals with many major issues of the contemporary scene, including human rights, social equality, and the moral implications of scientific research, particularly in the area of genetic engineering. 

Applied ethics is the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment. It is thus the attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally correct course of action in various fields of human life. Bioethics, for example, is concerned with identifying the correct approach to matters such as euthanasia, or the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with questions such as the duties or duty of 'whistleblowers' to the general public as opposed to their loyalty to their employers. As such, it is an area of professional philosophy that is well paid and highly valued both within and outside of academia.

Applied ethics is distinguished from normative ethics, which concerns what people should believe to be right and wrong, and from metaethics, which concerns the nature of moral statements.

An emerging typology for applied ethics (Porter, 2006) uses six domains to help improve organizations and social issues at the national and global level:

1. Decision ethics, or ethical theories and ethical decision processes
2. Professional ethics, or ethics to improve professionalism
3. Clinical ethics, or ethics to improve our basic health needs
4. Business ethics, or individual based morals to improve ethics in an organization
5. Organizational ethics, or ethics among organizations
6. Social ethics, or ethics among nations and as one global unit    
   

Applied ethics looks at controversial topics like war, animal rights and capital punishment

1.2 Uses of ethics

Ethics needs to provide answers. If ethical theories are to be useful in practice, they need to affect the way human beings behave. Some philosophers think that ethics does do this. They argue that if a person realises that it would be morally good to do something then it would be irrational for that person not to do it. But human beings often behave irrationally. They follow their 'gut instinct' even when their head suggests a different course of action.

However, ethics does provide good tools for thinking about moral issues. Ethics provides us with a moral map, a framework hat we can use to find our way through difficult issues.

Ethics can pinpoint a disagreement. Using the framework of ethics, two people who are arguing a moral issue can often find that what they disagree about is just one particular part of the issue, and that they broadly agree on everything else.That can take a lot of heat out of the argument, and sometimes even hint at a way for them to resolve their problem.

1.3 Limitations of ethics

Sometimes ethics doesn't provide people with the sort of help that they really want. Ethics doesn't always show the right answer to moral problems. Indeed more and more people think that for many ethical issues there isn't a single right answer - just a set of principles that can be applied to particular cases to give those involved some clear choices. Some philosophers go further and say that all ethics can do is eliminate confusion and clarify the issues. After that it's up to each individual to come to their own conclusions.

Many people want that there should be a single right answer to ethical questions. They find moral ambiguity hard to live with because they genuinely want to do the 'right' thing, and even if they can't work out what that right thing is, they like the idea that 'somewhere' there is one right answer. But often, there isn't one right answer - there may be several right answers, or just some least worst answers - and the individual must choose between them. Some fined moral ambiguity is difficult because it forces them to take responsibility for their own choices and actions, rather than falling back on convenient rules and customs.

One problem with ethics is the way it's often used as a weapon. If a group believes that a particular activity is "wrong" it can then use morality as the justification for attacking those who practice that activity.

1.4 Ethics and people

At the heart of ethics is a concern about something or someone other than ourselves and our own desires and self-interest. Ethics is concerned with other people's interests, with the interests of society, with God's interests, with "ultimate goods", and so on. So when a person 'thinks ethically' they are giving at least some thought to something beyond themselves. Ethics is not only about the morality of particular courses of action, but it's also about the goodness of individuals and what it means to live a good life. Virtue Ethics is particularly concerned with the moral character of human beings.At times in the past some people thought that ethical problems could be solved in one of two ways:

1. by discovering what God wanted people to do
2. by thinking rigorously about moral principles and problems
   

If people did these properly, they would be led to the right conclusion. But now even philosophers are less sure that it's possible to devise a satisfactory and complete theory of ethics. In fact modern thinkers often teach that ethics leads people not to conclusions but to 'decisions'.

Philosophy can help identify the range of ethical methods, conversations and value systems that can be applied to a particular problem. But after these things have been made clear, each person must make their own individual decision as to what to do, and then react appropriately to the consequences.

1.5 Nature of Ethical statements

Ethical realists think that human beings discover ethical truths that already have independent existence. Ethical non-realists think that human beings invent ethical truths. The problem for ethical realists is that people follow many different ethical codes and moral beliefs. So if there are real ethical truths out they are very hard to find out.

One form of ethical realism teaches that ethical properties exist independently of human beings, and that ethical statements give knowledge about the objective world. To put it another way; the ethical properties of the world and the things in it exist and remain the same, regardless of what people think or feel - or whether people think or feel about them at all.

On the face of it, ethical realism means the view that moral qualities such as wrongness, and likewise moral facts such as the fact that an act was wrong, exist in rerum natura, so that, if one says that a certain act was wrong, one is saying that there existed, somehow, somewhere, this quality of wrongness, and that it had to exist there if that act were to be wrong.

1.6 Ethics and ideology

Some philosophers teach that ethics is the codification of political ideology, and that the function of ethics is to state, enforce and preserve particular political beliefs. They usually go on to say that ethics is used by the dominant political elite as a tool to control everyone else. More cynical writers suggest that power elites enforce an ethical code on other people that helps them control those people, but do not apply this code to their own behaviour.

1.7 Sources of ethics

Philosophers points towards four sources from were we have derived our ethics.

1. God and religion
2. Human conscience and intuition
3. A rational moral cost-benefit analysis of actions and their effects (the example of good human beings)
4. A desire for the best for people in each unique situation
   

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