St.

Anthony’s College
General Education Curriculum
San Angel, San Jose, 5700 Antique

GEC 108: Ethics

Introduction to Ethics

A man without ethics is like a wild beast loose upon this world

Albert Camus

Human beings tend not to be very good at reasoning logically. It doesn’t come naturally to
us. We make mistakes. And it’s a fact that argument surrounds us. It plays with our emotion,
changes our attitude, talks us into a decision and lures us into something unthought-of. Argument
lies behind political labeling, advertising, jargon, voices, gestures and guilt trips; it forms a real-
life matrix, the supreme software that drives our social lives. And rhetoric serves as argument’s
decoder. By teaching the tricks we use to persuade one another, the art of persuasion reveals the
matrix in all its manipulative glory.
There is a need to recapture the joy of understanding life, of examining our place under the
sun. Learning this course will expose you to a wide range of possibilities in life, and of challenging
ideas and issues. Philosophy has striven to give a comparative answer to these challenging
problems and has continued to bring a fresh spirit of urgency and optimism to this awesome world
of philosophical inquiry. It begins not in certainty but in doubt, not in judgment but in questions.
I encourage you to always keep the inquiry real. This is the invitation of philosophy: Dare to Know
the Truth. Give philosophy a try. I tell you; you’ll never regret it. (Espartinez, 2013)

The Birth of Moral Philosophy

It all started when man began to wonder about how he should treat others and how he should live his
life with others. Man’s interest in the rightness of his actions and his desire to live the good life provides
the reason for the birth of another exciting branch of philosophy. Philosophers called it “Ethics” or “Moral
Philosophy.” Ethics comes from the Greek word “ethos,” which means “character.” For the Greeks, ethics
dealt with the development of a virtuous and moral character. They believed that developing such a
character would make one know the right thing to do and live the right way of life.
But what precisely is the right way of life? For Socrates, the great Greek moralist, the answer is an
examined life. An examined life is a life guided and enriched by self-awareness or self-knowledge. Self-
examination simply mean that we should know what we desire and know if they are (morally agreeable or
acceptable). We should know what we believe in and know if it is right or wrong. We should know who
we are, what we are and so on. According to Socrates, the first ethical imperative that we should observe is
know thyself. This leads us back to the nature of Ethics: it is a tool that can help us to investigate ourselves
– anything and everything about what we assume to know of ourselves as moral beings.

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 St. Anthony’s College
General Education Curriculum
San Angel, San Jose, 5700 Antique

Nature of Ethics
Ethics is defined as a special branch of Philosophy which deals with the study of the principles of
right moral action. Ethics aims to study the principles underlying the desirable types of human conduct and
to prescribe the principles and methods for distinguishing right from wrong and good from bad. Ethics is
concerned with the questions such as: what makes my action right or wrong, and how could I know it? How
should I live my life? How should I treat other human beings and how should I be treated? Etc.
Furthermore, ethics or moral philosophy is also known as the philosophical study of morality.
Morality refers to beliefs concerning right and wrong, good and bad. Beliefs can include judgments, values,
rules, principles and theories. Beliefs guide our actions, define our values, and give us reasons for being the
persons we are. Ethics and morality are sometimes used to refer to the moral norms of a specific group or
individual as in Greek ethics. In this sense, ethics addresses the powerful question that Socrates formulated
more than two thousand years ago: how ought we to live?
To further clarify what ethics is after defining it, a subsequent question to answer is: What is at stake
when we do ethics? In an important sense, the answer is everything we hold dear. Ethics is concerned with
values, specifically moral values. Our moral values determine what the most important things are in our
lives, what is worth living for and what is worth dying for.
Based on our moral values, we decide what is the greatest good, what goals we should pursue in life,
what virtues we should cultivate, what duties we should fulfill, what value we should put on human life,
and what pains and perils we should endure for notions such as the common good, justice and rights.

The Ethical Landscape

The domain of ethics is large, divided into several areas of investigation and cordoned off from
related subjects. So, let us map the territory carefully. As the term moral philosophy suggests, ethics is a
branch of philosophy. A very rough characterization of philosophy is the systematic use of critical reasoning
to answer the most fundamental questions in life. Moral philosophy, obviously, tries to answer the
fundamental questions of morality. The other major philosophical divisions address other basic questions;
these are logic (the study of correct reasoning), metaphysics (the study of the fundamental nature of reality),
and epistemology (the study of knowledge). As a division of philosophy, ethics does its work primarily
through critical reasoning. Critical reasoning is the careful, systematic evaluation of statements, or claims—
a process used in all fields of study, not just in ethics. Mainly this process includes both the evaluation of
logical arguments and the careful analysis of concepts.
Science also studies morality, but not in the way that moral philosophy does. Its approach is known
as descriptive ethics—the scientific study of moral beliefs and practices. Its aim is to describe and explain
how people actually behave and think when dealing with moral issues and concepts. This kind of empirical
research is usually conducted by sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. In contrast, the focus of
moral philosophy is not what people actually believe and do, but what they should believe and do. The
point of moral philosophy is to determine what actions are right (or wrong) and what things are good (or
bad).

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 St. Anthony’s College
General Education Curriculum
San Angel, San Jose, 5700 Antique

Philosophers distinguish three major divisions in ethics, each one representing a different way to
approach the subject. The first is normative ethics—the study of the principles, rules, or theories that guide
our actions and judgments. (The word normative refers to norms, or standards, of judgment—in this case,
norms for judging rightness and goodness.) The ultimate purpose of doing normative ethics is to try to
establish the soundness of moral norms, especially the norms embodied in a comprehensive moral system,
or theory. We do normative ethics when we use critical reasoning to demonstrate that a moral principle is
justified, or that a professional code of conduct is contradictory, or that one proposed moral theory is better
than another, or that a person’s motive is good. Should the rightness of actions be judged by their
consequences? Is happiness the greatest good in life? Is utilitarianism a good moral theory? Such questions
are the preoccupation of normative ethics.
Another major division is metaethics—the study of the meaning and logical structure of moral
beliefs. It asks not whether an action is right or whether a person’s character is good. It takes a step back
from these concerns and asks more fundamental questions about them: What does it mean for an action to
be right? Is good the same thing as desirable? How can a moral principle be justified? Is there such a thing
as moral truth? To do normative ethics, we must assume certain things about the meaning of moral terms
and the logical relations among them. But the job of metaethics is to question all these assumptions, to see
if they really make sense.
Finally, there is applied ethics—the application of moral norms to specific moral issues or cases,
particularly those in a profession such as medicine or law. Applied ethics in these fields goes under names
such as medical ethics, journalistic ethics, and business ethics. In applied ethics we study the results derived
from applying a moral principle or theory to specific circumstances. The purpose of the exercise is to learn
something important about either the moral characteristics of the situation or the adequacy of the moral
norms. Did the doctor do right in performing that abortion? Is it morally permissible for scientists to perform
experiments on people without their consent? Was it right for the journalist to distort her reporting to aid a
particular side in the war? Questions like these drive the search for answers in applied ethics.
In every division of ethics, we must be careful to distinguish between values and obligations.
Sometimes we may be interested in concepts or judgments of value—that is, about what is morally good,
bad, blameworthy, or praiseworthy. We properly use these kinds of terms to refer mostly to persons,
character traits, motives, and intentions. We may say “She is a good person” or “He is to blame for that
tragedy.” Other times, we may be interested in concepts or judgments of obligation—that is, about what is
obligatory or a duty or what we should or ought to do. We use these terms to refer to actions. We may say
“She has a duty to tell the truth” or “What he did was wrong.”
When we talk about value in the sense just described, we mean moral value. If she is a good person,
she is good in the moral sense. But we can also talk about nonmoral value. We can say that things such as
televisions, rockets, experiences, and artwork (things other than persons, intentions, etc.) are good, but we
mean “good” only in a nonmoral way. It makes no sense to assert that in themselves televisions or rockets
are morally good or bad. Perhaps a rocket could be used to perform an action that is morally wrong. In that
case, the action would be immoral, while the rocket itself would still have nonmoral value only.
Many things in life have value for us, but they are not necessarily valuable in the same way. Some
things are valuable because they are a means to something else. We might say that gasoline is good because
it is a means to make a gas-powered vehicle work, or that a pen is good because it can be used to write a
letter. Such things are said to be instrumentally, or extrinsically, valuable—they are valuable as a means to

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 St. Anthony’s College
General Education Curriculum
San Angel, San Jose, 5700 Antique

something else. Some things, however, are valuable in themselves or for their own sakes. They are valuable
simply because they are what they are, without being a means to something else. Things that have been
regarded as valuable in themselves include happiness, pleasure, virtue, and beauty. These are said to be
intrinsically valuable—they are valuable in themselves.

Bibliography

Articulo, A. C. (2004). Moral philosophy. Quezon City: Great books publishing.

MacKinnon, Barbara and Andrew Fiala. 2018. Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues.
9th ed. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Vaughn, Lewis. 2016. Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues. 4th ed.
New York: W. W. Norton.

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