Subject: GEC107

Course Description: ETHICS

SECOND GROUP OF LESSONS

1. DEFINITION OF ETHICS

“Ethics, generally speaking, is about matters such as the good thing

that we should pursue and the bad thing that we should avoid; the right ways
in which we could or should act and the wrong ways of acting. It is about
what is acceptable and unacceptable in human behavior. It may involve
obligations that we are expected to fulfill, prohibitions that we are required
to respect or ideals that we are encouraged to meet.

“Ethics as a subject for us to study is about determining the grounds

for the values with particular and special significance to human life.”

This is also known as valuation. Kinds of Valuation:

AESTHETICS & ETHICS

2. DEFINITIONS OF FOUR KINDS OF ETHICS

A. “A descriptive study of ethics reports how people, particularly

groups, make their moral valuation without making any judgment either for
or against these valuations. This kind of study is for social scientist,
historian, sociologist, anthropologist.

B. A normative study of ethics, as is often done in philosophy or

moral theology, engages the question: what could or should be considered as
the right way of acting? In other words, a normative discussion describes
what we ought to maintain as our standard or bases for moral valuation.

May I repeat, normative ethics addresses questions about what

practices are right and wrong. And what our obligations to other people
or future generations are. These are the questions for normative ethics.

Please do not miss the fact that the definition revolves around
 HUMAN RIGHT /
ACTION WRONG

I SAY: Normative ethics has to do with HUMAN ACTION. We focus on

human action for it is ACTION that we or MAN usually reacts to,
whether for him that ACTION is acceptable or not, not good or better,
right or wrong.

NOTA BENE: If one wants to know the ethical systems of T’boli, B’laan,
Klagan, Mansaka, Bagobo, Meranaw, Maguindanaon, Iranon, etc., a
research is usually conducted and this is part of descriptive ethics. And
that is not our concern sa GEC107, we focus on normative ethics.

C. “Metaethics talks about the nature of ethics and moral reasoning.

Discussions about whether ethics is relative and whether we always act from
self-interest are examples of meta-ethical discussions.

In fact, drawing the conceptual distinction between Metaethics,

Normative Ethics, Descriptive Ethics and Applied Ethics is itself a
“metaethical analysis.” Ex, what is the nature of morality? Why is right
right/why is wrong wrong?

Metaethics is the study of moral thought and moral

language. It asks what morality actually is.The metaethicist is
interested in whether there can be knowledge of moral truths, or
only moral feelings and attitudes, and asks how we understand
moral discourse as compared with other forms of speech and
writing.

D. Applied Ethics attempts to deal with specific realms of human

action and to craft criteria for discussing issues that might arise within those
realms. The contemporary field of Applied Ethics arouse in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Today, it is thriving part of the field of ethics. Numerous
books and web-sites are devoted to topics such as Business Ethics,
Computer Ethics, Medical Ethics, and Engineering Ethics. Applied ethics
is a branch of ethics devoted to the treatment of moral problems,
practices, and policies in personal life, professions, technology,
and government.

3. CLARIFICATIONS AND TERMINOLOGY

Recognizing the notions of good and bad, and right and wrong, are the
primary concern of ethics (normative ethics). In order to start, it would be
useful to clarify the following points.

FIRST POINT OF CLARIFICATION

A. AESTHETICS. There are instances that our value judgment is not

considered as part of ethics, like, you find a movie “good” or a song
“bad,” or you know of a “good” sawsawan for sinugbang tuna, or it
is “wrong” to wear barong tagalog tuck in, all these are not part of
ethics. These are under aesthetics.

“The word “aesthetics” is derived from the Greek word aesthesis (“sense” or
“feeling”) and refers to the judgments of personal approval or disapproval
that we make about what we see, hear, smell, or taste. In fact, we often use
the word “taste” to refer to the personal aesthetic preferences that we have
on these matters, such as “his taste in music” or “her taste in clothes.”

B. ETIQUETTE. “There are instances considered as trivial in

nature, like how to knock at the door politely, it’s wrong to barge at
one’s office, use of please as gauge of politeness, mangulangot is
wrong if done in public, all these are part of etiquette, which is
concerned with right and wrong actions, but not grave enough to be
part of ethics. To clarify this point, we can differentiate how I may be
displeased seeing a healthy young man refuse to offer his seat on the
bus to an elderly lady, but my indignation and shock would be much
greater if I were to see a man deliberately push another one out of a
moving bus.

C. TECHNICAL VALUATION. “There are technical valuation,

like, learning how to bake, there are the right way to do first in
baking, there are rules in basketball, so there right ways in playing.
“We derive from Greek word techne the English word “technique” and
“technical” which are often used to refer to a proper way (or right way) of
doing things, but a technical valuation (or right and wrong technique of
doing things) may not necessarily be an ethical one as these examples show.

SUMMARY: aesthetics, etiquette, and technical valuation are

excluded from ethical discussion

SECOND POINT OF CLARIFICATION:

The Terms Ethics and Morals

“We have terms like ethical, unethical, immoral, amoral, morality, etc.
We have to be careful in the use of “not” when applied to moral or ethical as
this can be ambiguous. If one says that lying is not ethical, it is ambiguous.
It has two meanings – 1) lying is not part of ethical discussion or 2) the act
of lying would be an unethical act.

“The term morals may be used to specific beliefs or attitudes that

people have or to describe acts that people perform. Sometimes it is said that
an individual’s personal conduct is referred to as his morals, and if he falls
short of behaving properly, this can be described as immoral. However, we
also have terms such as “moral judgment” or “moral reasoning,” which
suggest a more rational aspect. The term ethics can be spoken of as the
discipline of studying and understanding ideal human behavior and ideal
ways of thinking.

“Ethics is acknowledged as an intellectual discipline belonging to

philosophy. However, acceptable and unacceptable behaviors are also
generally described as ethical and unethical, respectively. In addition, with
regards to the acceptable and unacceptable ways of behaving in a given
field, we have the term professional ethics (legal ethics, medical ethics,
media ethics, etc).

“Therefore various thinkers and writers posit a distinction between the

terms moral and ethics and they may have good reasons, but there is no
consensus as to how to make the distinction. Ordinary conversation presents
a much less rigid distinction between these terms, and we will use the terms
ethical and moral (like, ethics and morality) interchangeably.”
 THIRD POINT OF CLARIFICATION:

TERMINOLOGIES - ISSUE, DECISION, JUDGMENT, &

DILEMMA

“Let us distinguish a situations that call for moral valuation. It can be

called a moral issue, like, imagine a situation wherein a person cannot
afford a certain item, but then the possibility presents itself for her to steal it.
This is a matter of ethics (and not just law) insofar as it involves the question
of respect for one’s property. We should add that “issue” is also often used
to refer to those particular situations that are often the source of considerable
and inconclusive debate (thus, we would often hear topics such as capital
punishment and euthanasia as moral issues).

“A situation confronted by the choice of what act to perform, it is

called moral decision, I choose not to take something I did not pay. When a
person is an observer who makes an assessment on the actions or behavior of
someone, she is making a moral judgment. For instance, a friend of mine
chooses to steal from a store, and I make an assessment that it is wrong.

“Finally, going beyond the matter of choosing right over wrong, or

good over bad, and considering instead the more complicated situation
where in one is torn between choosing one of two goods or choosing
between the lesser of two evils: this is referred to as a moral dilemma. We
have moral dilemma when an individual can choose only one from a number
of possible actions, and there are compelling ethical reasons for the various
choices. A mother may be conflicted between wanting to feed her hungry
child, but then recognizing that it would be wrong for her to steal is an
example of moral dilemma.

IV. Tool To Be Used in Ethical Discussion: Reason

“Ethics is interested with

Recently, I was tagged to read a letter
defending the frontliners against their
bashers. The reason given by the writer
to support the frontliners is this - “what
if the frontliners will stop working, what
questions: Why do we decide
to consider this way of acting
as acceptable while that way of
acting, its opposite, is
unacceptable? To put it in
another way, what reasons do
we give to decide or to judge
that a certain way of acting is
either right or wrong?

“A person’s fear of punishment

or desire for reward (Punishment
and reward) can provide him
a reason for acting in a
certain way.

It is common to hear someone say: “I did not cheat on the exam because I
was afraid that I might get caught,” or “I looked after my father in the
hospital because I wanted to get a higher allowance.”

In a certain sense, fear of punishment and desire for reward can be

spoken of as giving someone a “reason” for acting in a certain way.
But the question then would be: Is this reason good enough? That is to
say, this way of thinking seems to be a shallow way of understanding
reason because it does not show any true understanding of why
cheating on an exam is wrong or why looking after a member of my
family is in itself a good thing. The promise of rewards and the fear of
punishments can certainly motivate us to act, but are not in
themselves a determinant of the rightness or wrongness of a certain
way of acting or of the good or the bad in a particular pursuit. Is it
possible to find better reasons for finding a certain way of acting
either acceptable or unacceptable? “I am in situation wherein I could
obtain a higher grade for myself by cheating. I make the decision not to do
so. Or I know that my friend was in a position to get a better grade for
herself by cheating. She refuses to do so; I then make the judgment of
praising her for this. In making this kind of moral decision or moral
judgment, the question can be asked: why?
“Asking why brings us to a higher level of thinking. Perhaps one can rise
above the particulars of a specific situation, going beyond whatever
motivation or incentive is present in this instance of cheating (or not doing
so). In other words, our thinking may take on a level of abstraction, that is,
detaching itself from the particular situation and arriving at a statement
like, “Cheating is wrong,” by recognizing proper reasons for not acting in
this way. Beyond rewards and punishments, it is possible for our moral
valuation – our decisions and judgments – to be based on a principle.
Thus, one may conclude that cheating is wrong based on a sense of fair
play or a respect for the importance and validity of testing. From this, we
can define principles as rationally established grounds by which one
justifies and maintains her moral decisions and judgments.

“But why do we maintain one particular principle rather than another?

Why should I maintain that I should care for fair play and that cheating is,
therefore, wrong? Why is fair play better than cheating?

In case of fraternity hazing, why is it wrong to cause another person

physical injury or to take another’s life?

We can maintain principles, but we can also ask what good reason for
doing so. Such reasons may differ. So, for example, what makes death in a
hazing a tragedy? One person may say that life is sacred and God-given.
Another person may declare that Human life has a Priceless dignity. Still
Another may put forward the idea that taking another’s life does not
contribute to human happiness but to human misery instead. How exactly
do we arrive at any of these claims? This is where We turn to theory. A
moral (ethical) theory, is a systematic attempt to establish the validity of
maintaining certain moral principles. Insofar as a theory is a system of
thought or of ideas. It can also be referred to as framework. We can use
this term, “framework,” as a theory of interconnected ideas, and at the
same time, a structure through which we can evaluate our reasons for
valuing a certain decision or judgment.
“There are different frameworks that can make us reflect on the principles
that we maintain and thus, the decisions and judgment we make. By
studying these, we can reconsider, clarify, modify, and ultimately
strengthen our principles, thereby, informing better both our moral
judgments and moral decisions.