Ethics

Ethics & Communication

Ethics is a general term for what is often described as the “science of morality.” In philosophy, ethical behavior is that which is “good.” The Western tradition of ethics is sometimes called moral philosophy. This is one of the three major branches of philosophy, alongside metaphysics and epistemology.

Ethics can be divided into several categories such as descriptive ethics, metaethics, and normative ethics, applied ethics.

Descriptive Ethics

Simply involves describing how people behave and/or what sorts of moral standards they claim to follow.

Descriptive ethics will include research from the fields of anthropology; psychology, sociology and history in order to determine what people do or have believed about moral norms. Descriptive ethics is sometimes referred to as comparative ethics because so much activity can involve comparing ethical systems: comparing the ethics of the past to the present, comparing the ethics of one society to another and comparing the ethics which people claim to follow with the actual rules of conduct, which do describe their actions.

Descriptive ethics asks two basic questions:

1. What do people claim as their moral norms?

2. How do people actually behave when it comes to moral problems?

Metaethics

Investigates where our ethical principles come from, and what they mean.

· Are they merely social inventions?

· Do they involve more than expressions of our individual emotions?

It is a philosophical study of the meaning, nature and methodology of moral judgments and terms, relations between moral concepts, the correct ways of arguing about moral issues, similarities and differences between various normative systems like morality, religion, law, etiquette, aesthetics, the judgments of taste, etc.

Normative ethics

Takes on the task of arriving at moral standards that regulate right and wrong conduct. This may involve articulating the good habits that we should acquire, the duties that we should follow, or the consequences of our behavior on others. Normative ethics is concerned with classifying actions as right and wrong without bias, as opposed to applied ethics.

Applied ethics

Involves examining specific controversial issues, such as abortion, infanticide, animal rights, environmental concerns, homosexuality, capital punishment, or nuclear war. By using the conceptual tools of metaethics and normative ethics, discussions in applied ethics try to resolve these controversial issues.