Ethics produces moral judgments.
Ethics is a concept that relates to the study of morality and human action. The concept comes from the Greek term ethikos , which means "character." An ethical statement is a moral declaration that makes claims and defines what is good , bad, obligatory, permitted, etc. in relation to an action or decision.
Therefore, when someone applies an ethical sentence to a person, they are making a moral judgment . Ethics, then, studies morality and determines how members of a society should act. Therefore, it is defined as the science of moral behavior .
It should be noted that ethics is not coercive , since it does not impose legal punishments (its norms are not laws). Ethics helps in the fair application of legal norms in a State of law, but in itself it is not punitive from a legal point of view, but rather promotes self-regulation based on values .
Branches of ethics
Ethics can be divided into various branches, among which normative ethics (the theories that study moral axiology and deontology , for example) and applied ethics (refers to a specific part of reality, such as bioethics and ethics of professions ) stand out.
Regarding normative ethics , we can say that it is the branch that focuses on the study of the criteria to understand in which cases an action should be considered correct (as well as the opposite). It is based on the search for general principles that serve to justify the systems of rules and determines the reasons why we should adopt some of them.
All of this can be understood with one of the most well-known moral principles in history: the Golden Rule (also called the Golden Law ), which proposes “treating others as we would like to be treated.” If we use this criterion, it is likely that the actions we carry out towards our environment are correct, since no one would want to be treated unfairly, although it goes without saying that there are exceptions.
We can recognize, on the other hand, the following fundamental positions for normative ethics: consequentialism , virtue ethics and the aforementioned deontology .
Ethics acts as a guide when making decisions.
Its applications
Applied ethics , on the other hand, is also known as disciplined ethics , and is the branch that aims to apply ethical theories to controversial and well-defined moral issues. There are, in turn, several subdisciplines that focus specifically on these aspects, such as bioethics , which analyzes positions in biology and medicine related to issues such as euthanasia , organ donation, voluntary termination of pregnancy, and animal testing . Medical ethics also addresses these types of issues, but always focused on the practice of medical professionals.
Environmental ethics , for example, studies the link between people and the environment, generally starting from the following questions: what are our obligations towards the environment and why? Answering the second question is enough to justify the answer to the first. This area reflects on the importance of sustainable development and the conservation of ecology from an ethical point of view.
Ethics in communication , meanwhile, examines the role of journalism, considering issues such as propaganda and information manipulation. Ethics in technology , in turn, revolves around data privacy , the scope of artificial intelligence and other topics of interest.
Nepotism and corruption are issues studied by ethics in politics , while workplace harassment and discrimination in employment relations are concerns of ethics at work . If we focus on ethics in sport , concepts such as fair play and doping appear.
Ethics, of course, also enters into people's everyday sphere. There is a sexual ethic that can be associated with how interpersonal relationships develop in intimacy, where the idea of sexual consent comes into play. Food ethics , in turn, can lead a subject to opt for responsible consumption of food products, choosing veganism or vegetarianism to contribute to animal welfare and avoid exploitation.
Ethics defines what is good and what is bad.
Codes of ethics
It should be noted that in many areas and sectors there are so-called codes of ethics or codes of ethics . These are resources that, based on objective discernment, serve as a guide for the development of an activity.
These codes are based on values and standards to regulate the exercise of a profession, being useful when making certain decisions based on ethical principles. If we focus on journalism , to mention a trade or profession, a code of ethics can indicate the need to disseminate accurate, truthful and independent information from power in order to act responsibly and autonomously .
The contributions of different philosophers
Regarding the fundamental authors in the study of ethics, we cannot ignore the British Philippa Foot , the founder of contemporary virtue ethics and dedicated to the criticism of non-cognitivism , work that inspired many other philosophers from all over the world, nor the German Immanuel Kant , who reflected on how to organize human freedoms and moral limits.
One of the main concepts of Kantianism is the categorical imperative . According to Kant , morality is limited to a central commandment that does not arise from the command of a god, but from reason. This preposition that establishes the rules of right and wrong is the categorical imperative, which is autonomous and does not depend on ideological or religious criteria.
We should also not stop reading other figures of philosophy who took important steps in the field of ethics, such as Socrates , Plato , Aristotle , Simone Weil , Baruch Spinoza , Thomas Hobbes , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Carol Gilligan , Jean-Paul Sartre , Ayn Rand , Michel Foucault , Edith Stein , Friedrich Nietzsche , María Zambrano , John Locke and Albert Camus , among many other thinkers.