GOOD

AFTERNO
ON!
Of all vertebrates, man alone, being gifted
with the power of reason, has a sense of right
and wrong. Man has a sense of propriety
which any brute does not have. Only man is
aware of oughtness; hence, morality makes a
human being act as a human being and its
absence makes an animal act as animal. It is
in this context that morality is both a blessing
and a curse to man; a blessing insofar as man
alone is moral and so he ought to act morally;
a curse because if he fails to act morally, man
becomes less human and even worse than a
beast that has no morality.
This truism might have prompted John Stuart
Mill to say that “it is better to be human being
dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a
Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” The
point here is that a human being has of
propriety which a pig does not have. A fool
enjoys being foolish and asinine while
Socrates exalts a decent life that is worth
living. The big difference makes a person
rational and moral. Filipinos aptly put it thus:
Madali ang maging tao,pero mahirap ang
magpakatao. For to become truly human is to
be moral.
CHED  Memorandum Order no.20,series of 2013 (general education curriculum on ETHICS )

This module in SSP114(ETHICS)

introduces students to the ethical
dimension of human existence at various
levels-personal, societal, environmental,
and cultural. What is Ethics, how is it
framed and practiced and what is its
value to society and the person are the
major questions this module seeks to
answer.
 What Will You Learn?
At the end of this module, you should be able to equip yourself with
knowledge, skills to make moral judgments by using dominant moral
frameworks and solve moral dilemmas. Specifically, you should be able to;

1.differentiate between moral and non-moral problems

2.explain the influence of Filipino culture on the way they look at  moral
experiences and solve moral dilemmas
3.describe what a moral experience is as it happens in different levels of human
existence
4.describe the elements of moral development and moral experiences
5.use ethical frameworks or principles to analyse moral experiences
6.make sound ethical judgments based on principles, facts,and the stakeholders
7.develop sensitivity to the common good
8.understand and internalize the principles of ethical behaviour in modern society
at the level of the person, society, and in interaction with the environment and
other shared resources.
 
• What Do You Already Know?

• Find out how much you already know about this module.
• Try to answer the Module pre-test:

• 1.Differentiate the following moral concepts.(20pts)

•     a.) ethics and law  
• ______________________________________________________
____________________________________ 
•  
•     b.) moral and legal
• ______________________________________________________
_________________________________
•     c.) human acts and acts of man
• ______________________________________________________
__________________________________
d.) natural law ethics and utilitarianism
________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________

2.Describe the following (30pts).

a.) Human experience as moral.
________________________________________________________
________________________________________ 
 b.) a just war.
________________________________________________________
_______________________________________

c.) invincible ignorance

________________________________________________________
_____________________________________
 LESSON 1
Ethics: Its Meaning, Nature and Scope

• What Will You Learn?

After studying this lesson, you should be able to:

1.explain the meaning, nature and scope of ethics as a

philosophical discipline;
2.articulate the importance of ethics;
3.show the distinctive feature of ethics in relation to law, religion
and other empirical sciences;
4.describe the human person as a moral agent and the moral
dimension of human experience;
5.cite examples to simplify the characteristics of moral principles.
• What Is This Lesson About?
Lesson One will shed light on the meaning,
nature and scope of Ethics as the science of right
living. Ethics and morality will be distinguished
as well as ethics and law and religion. The
human person as a moral agent will be
described and human experience  as to its moral
dimension. Characteristics of moral principles
will be enumerated and explained along with
the formal and material objects of morality.
The Meaning Of Ethics And Its Evolution

Etymologically, Ethics is derived from the Greek word

ethos which means custom, or a particular way and
manner of acting and behaving. Thus, custom would also
mean here as a form of behaviour or character. The Latin
equivalent for custom is mos or mores. It is from this root
word that the term moral or morality is derived. The two
terms ,ethics and morality, in this sense therefore, have
literally the same meaning. That is why ethics is usually
taken as synonymous with morality. Also because of this,
ethics is also called morality or more precisely, the other
name of ethics is morality. Thus in many instances, we
often hear people say: ”What he did is moral or ethical.”
 In its real sense, ethics as a philosophy is a
fundamental discipline. It is concerned with
reflexive thinking for it seeks and examines core
values, norms, principles and traditions. Ethics
is a discipline of higher order.

Normatively, ethics investigates the morality of

human conduct. Morality is concerned the
rightness or wrongness of human actions. An act
can be judged as right or wrong based on the
motive, the circumstances or the nature of the
act itself. It is the task of ethics to examine these
in order to assess the morality of an act.
Ethics and Morality Distinguished
Though ethics and morality, by virtue of their
etymological construction, and on how they are used in
people’s daily conversations, share practically the
same meaning, there is still a slight difference between
them. Generally, both ethics and morality deal with the
goodness or badness, rightness or wrongness of the
human act or conduct. But in ethics, we specifically
study morality. Morality gives ethics a particular
perspective of what to study about-that is the rectitude
of whether an act is good or bad, right or wrong,
MORALITY PROVIDES WITH A QUALITY THAT
DETERMINES AND DISTINGUISHES RIGHT
CONDUCT FROM WRONG.
 While ethics (the theory) provides certain
principles and guidelines as to what is good
and bad, right and wrong in human conduct,
it is morality which actualizes the theory.
Ethics is the word while morality is the flesh.
Morality is  here aptly understood as the
application (praxis) of ethics(theory). As
ethics outlines theories of right and wrong,
good and bad actions, morality translates
these theories into real action.
•  
Why do we still need Ethics if we have
laws to guide us on how to be good? Are 
the laws that we have not enough to tell
us what’s right or wrong? Is it not that
Ethics essentially consists of rules
concerning right and wrong, on what we
ought to do and not do?
Ethics and The Law

St. Thomas Aquinas defined law as an ordinance of

reason promulgated for the common good by the one who
has the care of the society. There are five features of the law:

• Rational: reason is for the preservation of the good;

• Ordinance: laws are obligation, ought, and binding  on
everyone who has right reason to know the truth.
• Promulgated: the precepts of the law are made-known,
they are publicized.
• Charged: in a democracy, authority resides in us.
• Common good: for everyone.
• Ethical rules are necessary even if we have the laws that
are implemented by civil authorities since legality is not
identical morality.
• Another reason why morality is still important even if we
have laws to guide us in our daily conduct is that laws are
only concerned with actions that are usually public.
Morality does delve on the domain of the majority ,its not a
numbers game but reflective of what is true and good
according to the nature of a thing or act.
• We still need Ethics even if we have laws because ethics
serves as the very foundation of our laws. It is because of
ethics that we have laws in the first place, and we continue
to need ethics in order to refine and perfect our legal
system.
• In brief, morality precedes legality. Its scope and implications
are deeper and wider than the law.
Ethics and Religion
• Another important distinction that has to be made
regarding Ethics as a normative discipline is its
intimate relation with that of religion or
theology,an area of knowledge which is also
normative,just like law.
• Ethics as a philosophical discipline solely relies
on natural reason,logic and experience,especially
in the justification and validation of certain
theories and principles concerning good and
bad.Religion,on the other hand,relies primarily
and mainly on supernatural reason,that is-divine
revelation or divine authority.
• The practice of morality need not be
motivated by religious considerations and
moral principles need not be grounded in
revelation as religious teachings invariably
are. Again, ethics grounds itself on reason,
and the wisdom of human experience, not
on the supposed authority of any holy book
and sacred writings.
Why Do We Need Ethics?
1. Ethics equips us with the knowledge
essential to make the right choice.
2. The study of ethics can provide us with
certain moral paradigms or perspectives that
will, in a away, guide us in determining what’s
right and what’s wrong under such condition.
3. The study of ethics will also enable us to
reason out our moral beliefs and of why we
hold them.
4. Ethics can deepen our reflection on the
ultimate questions of life.
THE HUMAN PERSON :A MORAL
AGENT
• WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE MORAL?
According to the French philosopher Jean Paul
Sartre, ”everything has been  figured out, except how to
live.” The German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, provides
a very clever response, telling us that “he who has a why
in life can always bear any how.”Truly, the business of
philosophers is to introduce us to great ideas. But the
point of the matter is that humans have to live their
individual lives. The brilliance of great thinkers, notably
Plato, Aristotle,and Kant, is not in their moral prescriptions
but rather, it is in the path they have opened for us.
What is the moral good?
In response  and unarguably, while the human
mind seeks to discover the reality of the infinite
universe beyond us, there exists a deep and serious
feeling inside of us. Being human, we desire to live
well, to act justly  and to live morally upright lives.
People in the past were concerned with a divine
plan. Things of course have changed. Today, our
foremost concern is life-life and what that life truly
essentially means. The idea here is this, There is a
human person behind this life. Thus, to respect life
fully means to respect the human person who is the
ultimate bearer of the value of life.
• Being human, we are conscious of a world around us
that demands our serious moral attention. In this
regard, as human subjects, our conduct should always
be governed by moral principles, by notions of right and
wrong, by ideas of what is good and just. We have to
be aware of the presence of other beings who suffer.
This awareness implies that we carry the burden of
being human. We can be  liable because we know the
whys and the hows of things. Being human is never
easy because we have to act in moral ways at all times.

• AS RATIONAL BEINGS, WE ARE MORALLY BOUND TO DO

WHAT OUR NATURE TELLS US-GOOD.
THE DIGNITY OF THE HUMAN PERSON and
its  conceptual development

• For Aristotle and the Stoics, the concept of human

dignity was associated with freedom and human
abilities.it concerns the freewill of the human being
which empowers him to make decisions. Because
humans are free beings, violating this capacity for
free decision-making violates human dignity.
• To be human means to possess certain rights and to
violate these rights      means to violate the very
dignity of the person. A human right implies an
entitlement, which suggests that one can pursue a
moral claim on something.
• The human person is whole. This means that
the human person cannot be subordinated to
anything in the world. No person should be
used as a mere means to further ends of
other men.

• The basic idea is that respect for human

rights  should serve as the moral norm in a
just society.
THE MORAL DIMENSION OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

• “The  experience of morality is part of every

person’s life.”(Michael Moga,1993.1)
• Are all areas of human life covered by ethical
evaluation and judgment? ARE ALL HUMAN
CONDUCT AND ENTERPRISE SUBJECT TO
MORAL PRAISE OR CONDEMNATION? Or
are there some aspects in human experience
not within the domain of ethics and morality? Or
are we to conceive of morality as an integral part
of every human experience?
Moga cites and explores two basic positions to the above
questions in his book  Toward Authentic Morality:An Ethics
Textbook for the Philippines(1993.2-3):
1.A Morality Position, in here morality is understood as occupying
just one area among the many diverse areas in human life.
Morality’s scope is simply confined to a specific and limited area
in human existence. Hence the rest of the other areas in human
experience are not subject to ethics and morality.
2.The second position is quite the opposite of the first. This claims
that practically all of human life is under the domain of morality.
That morality is ever present and is necessary for man to be truly
human. This would affirm that there are clear-cut moral rules  for
every situation in life. It insists that to be human means that one
recognizes  these rules and strictly follow them since they are the
basic guides for everything man does. This position totally
considers morality as permeating all facets of human experience.
 CHARACTERISTICS OF MORAL
PRINCIPLES
1. REASONABILITY-This means that primarily, moral
judgments must be backed up by good reasons or arguments
if we want to discover the truth about what’s good and bad,
we must let our feelings be guided  as much as possible by
reason.

2. PRESCRIPTIVITY-This refers to the practical, or action-

guiding nature of morality.

3. IMPARTIALITY-This means that ethical or moral rules

should be neutral when it comes to the question as to who will
be its recipient.Moral standards are supposed to apply to
everyone regardless of one’s status and situation in life.
4. OVERRIDINGNESS-Moral standards must
have hegemonic authority. This means that
they should tower over all the other standards 
or norms of evaluation, whatever they may be.
5. AUTONOMOUS FROM ARBITRARY
AUTHORITY-Moral standards should stand on
their own logic independent of the arbitrariness
of the majority. We can always challenge on
logical grounds the tyranny of numbers and
the tide of public opinion on matters of right
and wrong.
6. PUBLICITY-This simply means that moral
rules and principles must be made public if they
are to serve as guidelines to our actions.
7. PRACTICABILITY-Moral rules should not be
impossible to achieve or else they are not for
men but for angels. This further means that
ethical standards must not be over what any 
ordinary human  is capable of doing.
8. UNIVERSALIZABILITY-A moral rule or
principle must be applicable to everyone without
exception, provided of course that all people are
in a relevantly similar situation or context.