Hello, dear readers of the KtoNaNovenkogo.ru blog. We live in a society among other people who differ from each other in their worldview and perception of reality.
In order to live peacefully, humanity has come up with certain rules and laws governing the interaction between individuals.
Ethics is the study of the relationship between man and society - it is a science that studies the values and moral principles underlying human behavior.
Global hysteria
There are frequent statements in political circles that today there is a severe decline in values. Increasingly, you can hear that people need to create a new morality in order to avoid violence and acts of vandalism.
Let's look at the suburbs of Paris, where it has become the order of things to show one's protest by bursting out with rage, adrenaline, and destroying everything around.
People in power complain about the loss of morality, while they themselves are often the reasons for the destruction of structures of social solidarity. What led to this?
- Democratization of education,
- devaluation of employment conditions, labor protection,
- condemning "anti-social" behavior of young people without any further action,
- lack of support for patriotic feelings and much more.
All this leads to a hectic pace of life, because people are left to themselves and are independently responsible for their own destiny. So they try to achieve everything and more in the short period of time allotted to them by fate.
Bottom line: there are more and more hysterical people in the world, suffering from their own limitations. Their distinctive feature is short-term planning, chaotic actions without any connection to the future.
And ethics is precisely the science that tries to instill in people the desire for leisure: for a slow lifestyle, art, and the thought process. After all, it is in slow thinking that plans for the future, forecasting, and modeling of situations are born.
In the modern world, market competition reigns as a model of behavior and social interaction. People begin to fear becoming replaceable, which is why the pace of life accelerates. And as a result, all this leads to the above-mentioned decline in values.
The task of ethics is to strengthen resistance to this process, to help a person get out of the networks of such fear and learn to live in peace with himself and the environment.
Now let's talk about everything in order.
The concept and subject of ethics
Ethics - the doctrine of good and evil
The concept of ethics came to us from ancient Greek (Greek ἠθικόν, from ancient Greek ἦθος - ethos, “character, custom”).
Ethics is a philosophical discipline. The subject of research and study of ethics is morality and ethics.
This doctrine was created with slightly different goals. The meaning of the word “ethos” was interpreted as the rules of living together, norms for the unity of society, the fight against aggressiveness and individualism. But with the development of society, the study was added here:
- good and evil,
- friendship,
- sympathy,
- self-sacrifice,
- the meaning of life.
Today, synonyms for the concept of ethics are mercy, friendship, justice, solidarity - any concepts that guide the moral development of relationships and social institutions.
An interesting fact is that ethics is characteristic only of human society and its analogues are completely absent in the animal world
As for ethics as a discipline, there is the following definition:
Ethics is a field of knowledge, and the subject of ethics as a science (that is, what it studies) is morality and ethics.
Sometimes ethics is understood as a system of ethical and ethical values within a particular society .
In the work program of the discipline “ethics” you can also find the main problems:
- The problem of the concepts of good and evil, vices and virtues;
- The problem of the purpose of people on earth and the meaning of life;
- The problem of free will;
- The problem of the concept of “should” and the combination of this concept with the natural desire for happiness.
As you already understand, smart and cunning people skillfully use the errors between these concepts to push people off the right path. However, everyone has their own right path. Ethics refers to disciplines that only help a person find it, in no case indicating the only correct option.
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Epicurus and the Stoics
In contrast to Aristotle, Epicurus put forward his hypothesis of morality, according to which only the life that leads to the satisfaction of basic needs and desires is happy and virtuous, because they are easily achieved, which means they make a person serene and satisfied with everything.
The Stoics left the deepest mark on the development of ethics after Aristotle. They believed that all virtues (good and evil) are inherent in a person just as in the world around them. The goal of people is to develop in themselves qualities that correlate with goodness and eliminate the evil inclination. The most prominent representatives of the Stoics were Zeno in Greece, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius in Rome.
Classification of ethical values
According to Hartmann, all moral values can be divided into:
- basic - are the basis of all other values, include goodness and the neighboring values of nobility, purity and completeness;
- private – values-virtues.
Private values are divided in turn into three large groups:
- The values of ancient morality: wisdom, justice, self-control, courage. Here are Aristotelian values based on the principle of the mean.
- The values of the “cultural circle of Christianity”: sincerity and truthfulness, love for one’s neighbor, fidelity, hope, faith and trust, humility, modesty, distance, the value of external behavior.
- Other values: giving virtue, love of the distant, personal love.
A Brief History of Ethics
The evolution of this science is especially clearly visible in jurisprudence
. We have already found out what ethics studies as a science and academic discipline, what its object, subjects, tasks and goals are. But when and why did this science arise? Why was it necessary to single her out? At what point did the need for ethics as an academic discipline arise?
Back in the 5th century. BC. the sophists discovered that the laws of nature do not coincide with the manifestations of culture. Natural necessity is the same everywhere, but human morals, customs and laws are different everywhere.
In this regard, the problem of comparing different morals and laws arose in order to find out which of them is the best.
An interesting fact is that as soon as people began the process of comparison, it immediately became clear: numerous morals and laws, changing not only from people to people, but also from generation to generation, are also interpreted differently depending on the justification. Reason is the only source of their justification.
This idea was quickly picked up by Socrates and Plato and began to be developed further.
Even at the stage of its emergence, it immediately became clear that ethics cannot be considered in isolation from philosophy.
Aristotle designated ethics as a special branch of practical philosophy, since it tries to answer the question: what should we do? The thinker himself considered happiness to be the main goal of moral behavior. Then this word was understood as the activity of the soul in the fullness of virtue or self-realization - reasonable actions, far from extremes and adhering to the golden mean. And the main virtues of Aristotle's teachings were prudence and moderation.
Plato's student was also confident that the subject and main tasks of ethics lay not in knowledge itself, but in the actions of people. And here, as a transparent thread, there was an inextricable connection between what the good was and how to achieve it.
The starting point of this science is not principles, but the experience of social life. That is why there cannot be the same precision that is inherent in mathematics, for example. The truth here can be established only in general terms, approximately.
Aristotle taught that there are different goals, forming a hierarchy. There must be a higher, final end that is to be desired in itself and not seen as a means to some other end. It is this that is the highest good and can determine the measure of perfection of the individual and social institutions. The highest good is happiness, which requires external goods, as well as Madame luck. But to a large extent it will depend on spiritual work - on activity correlated with virtue. And the subject of study and the purpose of ethics as a science according to Aristotle is the property of the soul to act in the image of virtues.
In a broad sense, ethics is a science that sets the basis for economics and politics.
It is from ethics that the golden rule came to us: do not do to others what you do not want for yourself! Many people think that it is biblical, but in fact it has existed in different cultures since ancient times, found in the Mishnah and Confucius.
Ethical theories continued to evolve, and philosophers began to experience some difficulty in using unified terms. The fact is that in different teachings completely different concepts were declared basic.
The subject of religious ethics in cultures with a personified God is God himself - this is the subject of morality. Then the basis is the norms that religion has declared divine by order. And the ethics of social relations as a system of moral obligations to society is replaced by divine ethics - a system of moral obligations to God. And sometimes this fact can be the cause of a conflict (social or even mass) with the morality of society.
What is morality
The word “morality” comes from the Latin word mos, meaning the way a person behaves and behaves, then transformed into moralis, meaning “appropriate behavior”, “following customs”.
This is where “morality” arises in the sense of fighting spirit - a visible manifestation of the soldiers’ moods, expressed in their behavior. By the way, the word “immoral” also appears only in the context of assessing behavior. In other words, the word “morality” does not mean a person’s value system as such, but how a person expresses it (acting out) through his behavior.
What is logical: there is simply no other way to get an idea of someone’s value system, of someone’s ideas about what is good and what is bad, except by their actions, by their course of action in a situation of moral choice.
That is, morality is a person’s value system expressed in his behavior. Morality is not an abstraction, but a very real behavioral phenomenon observed in every person; which makes the concept of public morality material—based on the coinciding manifestations of morality in the behavior of the majority.
Two important features of morality, without mentioning which it will not be possible to move on:
- There is a moral component to the behavior of every capable person, whether he is aware of it or not. Life constantly presents moral choices: how to behave with someone who depends on you, how to behave towards another in the absence of witnesses, what to do in case of danger threatening someone else, etc. - any choice in a situation of moral choice expresses the morality of the person who made it. Morality is the choice that a person makes in a moral choice situation.
- A person’s actions reveal his morality not only to those around him, but also to himself. Many people know the difference between their own ideas about how they would behave in a given hypothetical situation and how they would actually behave if they found themselves in a similar situation in life. This is exactly the phenomenon Dr. Phil talks about when he talks about how a person gains self-esteem. Often a person’s behavior turns out to be a surprise for himself, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s pleasant or not: it is important that a person’s morality is not only inherent to him, but also initially unfamiliar.
This is exactly what Aristotle saw in the 4th century BC: that every person, from nowhere, has a built-in program of behavior in a situation of moral choice - for example, at the sight of someone falling: whoever pushes the falling one, someone will give him a hand - and tried unravel what is behind this by separating the study of morality into a separate discipline called ethics.
His attempt to understand and describe the structure, logic and laws of morality turned into one of the long mysteries and seemingly hopeless mysteries in history, because the task that he set for himself was obviously unsolvable without knowledge of genes and natural selection - that is , at least another 2200 years.
In Darwin's standby mode, ethics turned into a battle of fan fiction - in the absence of data, the gaps were filled with speculation, for example, about the divine origin of this or that moral norm, taken as a constant.
- In other words, having appeared with the aim of unraveling the nature of morality, ethics never went beyond speculation in its explanations.
- However, the real value of ethics lies in the development and study of man-made ethical systems.
This means that all systems of ethics, values and norms known today are, for the most part, man-made. Moreover, regardless of the goals of their creation - be it the creation of a new ethics from scratch, or another attempt to unravel the structure of morality - none of them takes into account the discoveries of genetics and evolutionary psychology, without which it is impossible to explain morality or develop an effective model from scratch seems possible.
- A system of ethics that has the right to claim finality and fidelity has not yet been created, just as there was no possibility of doing so;
- there are no ethical constants. Moral ones are possible - but not proven, and without this, any ethical postulates are nothing more than variables;
- in other words, nothing is sacred;
- therefore, it is not only possible, but also necessary to question any ethical postulates.
But what exactly does it mean to “question”? This means that in order to understand the mysteries of ethics, a scientific approach is necessary. That is, ethics must be pulled out from the margins of philosophy and approach the issue of studying it as scientifically as possible, that is, making it a science again (science is knowledge in a certain area obtained using a scientific approach).
Modern ethics
In modernity there is a place for both nihilism and the expansion of ethical concepts. The concept of goodness moves to relationships with nature and the scientific sphere (biocentric ethics and bioethics).
As feminism developed, ethics began to be interpreted from a gender perspective. Now abstract humanity and humanity as virtues are grouped along the lines of masculinity and femininity.
The ethics of nonviolence, founded by Tolstoy and Gandhi, is continued in the ideas of Albert Schweitzer, who described in his book the history of this science and its state in the 20th century, and also suggested ways for its further development.
But Teilhard de Chardin took a different path. He draws clear parallels between traditional ethics and the theory of evolution.
Other sciences also made their own changes to ethics. Developing medicine and biotechnology have caused the rapid development of bioethics, which analyzes the complex ethical difficulties that arise when making judicial, legal, medical and other decisions.
It’s rare today that people haven’t heard of the “prisoner’s dilemma.” She is a prime example of the logical-mathematical aspects of moral choice that are studied in game theory.
Morality concept
Morality is a sociocultural phenomenon that forms the fundamental essence of humanity. All human activities are based on ethical standards recognized in the society in which they live.
Knowledge of moral rules and ethical behavior helps individuals adapt among others. Morality is also an indicator of the degree to which a person is responsible for his actions.
Ethical and spiritual qualities are cultivated from childhood. From theory, through right actions towards others, they become a practical and everyday aspect of human existence, and their violation is condemned by the public.
Sections of ethics
Despite the fact that ethics is often viewed as a moral philosophy that indicates the path of worthy behavior, it is at the same time a system of knowledge about the nature and origin of morality. That is why there are two subjects and specifics of the task of ethics - moral-educational and cognitive-educational. As a consequence, two areas were identified in the second half of the 20th century, which took shape into two completely independent (but interrelated) disciplines:
- Normative ethics – focuses on life science and theoretical ethics.
- Theoretical ethics is aimed at understanding morality.
- Practical ethics is the place of morality in the real lives of people.
Theoretical ethics
Theoretical ethics considers morality as a special social phenomenon, finds out what it is, how morality differs from other social phenomena.
The subject and object of the science is theoretical ethics - origin, historical development, patterns of functioning, social role and other aspects of morality. It is based on knowledge, ideas and concepts from the scientific knowledge of morality.
Ethics is not the only science whose subject area is morality:
- Sociology and social psychology are busy studying the social function of morality and the rules it propagates in relation to other social phenomena.
- Personality psychology studies the physiological basis of morality.
- Linguistics and logic study the language of morality, forms and rules of normative and ethical logic.
These sciences also made a significant contribution to the development of ethics. The results of these studies form the basis of theoretical ethics, generalized and used by it.
Within theoretical ethics, metaethics .
Metaethics is a direction of analytical ethics within which ethics itself is analyzed as a scientific discipline.
The first sensible study in metaethics is considered to be the work “Principles of Ethics” by George E. Moore. The subject and tasks of metaethics as a science are the study of questions about the subject, structure, and purpose of ethics in dictionaries, textbooks and reference books.
Within the framework of metaethics, one can distinguish such a direction as noncognitivism - a doctrine that questions the cognitive status of ethics, the knowability of ethical concepts due to their uncertainty and the very fact of the admissibility of its existence as a science. Through this discipline, metaethics seeks to objectively study various ethical concepts.
Normative ethics
The subject of normative ethics is the search for a principle that regulates human behavior, guides his actions, establishes criteria for assessing moral goodness and a rule that could act as a general principle, a model for all subsequent cases.
The purpose of normative ethics is to maintain fundamental moral values in society, to create norms of behavior in everyday life situations by appealing to reason; this section of ethics uses reasons, arguments, and evidence. This is what makes it attractive to any critically thinking person, in contrast to moralizing.
Moral principles take the form of rational reasoning, which turns into internal feelings that motivate behavior.
And for moral concepts and assessments to acquire the status of inflexible, there are two main ways:
- give them a mystical, divine meaning;
- give a natural objective meaning.
From a noncognitivist perspective, normative ethics is an element of moral consciousness, not morality in general.
Normative ethics was preceded by such directions as stoicism, hedonism, epicureanism, and among modern ones - consequentialism, utilitarianism, deontology.
Applied ethics
Applied (or practical) ethics is concerned with the study of particular problems and the application of moral ideas and principles formulated in normative ethics in particular situations of moral choice.
This section of ethics is quite closely related to modern socio-political sciences and includes the following sections:
- Bioethics.
- Medical ethics.
- Computer ethics.
- Professional ethics.
- Political ethics.
- Social ethics.
- Business ethics.
- Environmental ethics.
- Legal ethics.
Bioethics is the doctrine of the moral side of human activity in biology and medicine.
The narrow side of this science considers all ethical problems between doctor and patient, ambiguous situations that constantly arise in practical medicine. And these problems need to be considered not only within the narrow medical community, but also among the general public. The broad side of the term is associated with the study of social, environmental, medical and socio-legal issues not only in relation to humans, but also to any living organisms. Here, bioethics is distinguished by its philosophical character, evaluating the fruits of labor and the development of new ideas and technologies in biology and medicine. In general, we have studied the concept, subject, foundations and functions of ethics. And although students in universities do not attach due importance to this subject (the main blame for this lies on the shoulders of teachers who are unable to instill love and understanding of the discipline), we see how vitally important it is for all humanity.
However, this science is quite complex, and not everyone will like writing tests, term papers or diplomas in ethics. But don’t worry, because there is always a trusted student service nearby, ready to help in difficult times!
Current ethical issues
Despite the fact that we are accustomed to consider modern society to be quite developed, it not only has many ethical problems that were noted by the philosophers who stood at the origins of this discipline, but has also given rise to new ones. The latter are interconnected with the information, technical and economic development of society and the political processes occurring in it.
One of the main problems that is particularly acute is the uneven distribution of resources on the planet. While the population explosion is characteristic of some countries, the world's resources are at the mercy of other countries. People's values are changing, and the tendency to replace the spiritual sphere with materialism is growing. The very understanding of the meaning of human life changes.
Contemporary ethical issues are:
- terrorism resulting from globalization;
- creating a common basis for the development of different cultures - the ideas of non-violence and democratization of society;
- virtualization of communication processes;
- information security problem.
These problems lead a person to one thing: the readiness to make the right moral choice for harmonious coexistence with society and oneself.
Ethics is a science, the study of which is important in our time. Originated many centuries ago, it is capable of shedding light on the problems of the world and the human soul, teaching how to follow the moral law and observe moral principles.
