Mapua University

Department of Arts and Letters

CE2-B2, 4thQ2019

Name: Baldoque, Mark Kenneth B. SN: Seat Number 2

Activity: What is Ethics? Date: August 21, 2019

Ethics is the theory of what is right and wrong. Good or evil, justified, permissible and
unjustifiable and with ethics we can understand how this applies in concrete cases. Ethics deals
with such questions at all levels. Its subject consists of the fundamental issues of practical decision
making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which
human actions can be judged right or wrong. ethics could have come into existence only when
human beings started to reflect on the best way to live. This reflective stage emerged long after
human societies had developed morality, usually in the form of customary standards of right and
wrong conduct. The process of reflection tended to arise from such customs, even if in the end it
may have found them wanting.
This question would have confused our ancestors. Ethics were an inherent part of their
daily lives. Today, however, we live in a different time, a time when ethical behavior appears to
have diminished in our culture. As a result, an ethics course is appropriate, valuable and useful.
studying ethics won't make you ethical; nor is that its purpose. Nevertheless, it can be a useful
study. It may help you understand better what is best, and how to pursue it. It may also help you
participate in constructive discussion with others about what is best; and such discussions and
debates are an essential part of the way a society forms its values.
Ethics is both easy and hard. It can be easy or hard to know what's good, and easy or hard
to do it. Usually the hard part of ethics is doing what you know is right when the cost is more than
you want to pay. At best, the academic study of ethics will help you anticipate difficult choices, so
that when they come along, they don't catch you completely off guard. But if you don't have the
will to do the right thing when it hurts, ethics courses won't give it to you.