ETHICS – GEC107 March 22, 2023

INTRODUCTION
ETHICS – MORAL PHILOSOPHY:
Ethics – is a branch of philosophy
Philosophy – (Coined by Pythagoras- an ancient Greek thinker)
 “Philos” and “Sophia” which means “LOVE OF WISDOM”.
 Pythagoras is not the father of Philosophy. No one is. No one really knows when it all
started.
 Philosophy began when someone started to wonder and asked questions to understand
themselves and the nature of the world around them.
 Our ancestors: They did not have a set of moral standard, like we have today, apart from
the rules of survival.
 Basic mindset: (Food-eating, drinking, and sex.) They prioritized their survival and
biological needs.
 Art - is an expression of humanity.
 Our ancestors started to identify themselves as different from the rest of the animals when
they started to paint and make arts.
 Philosophy began when our ancestors surpassed the ordinary nature of simply being a
beast. They started to evolve as a human being and began to wonder: “Who am I?”, “Why
am I here?”, “Where am I going?”, and other fundamental questions in life.
 “Wonder makes us human beings.”
Socrates:
 “Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”
–SOCRATES (Plato, Theaetetus, 155)
Theaetetus – One of the books that Plato wrote which contains his ideologies and Socrates’
Dialogue. (aws char dili diay hahaha search ko ni kay basin muggawas… wa pa ko load)
What is Ethics?
 The study of ethics or moral philosophy attempts to answer a philosophical
question/fundamental question.
 The fundamental problem of the study of Ethics: “What is the basis of judging an action as
good or bad?” or “What makes right as right and wrong as wrong?”
 Example: “Where is morality really based upon?” – “Is murder bad? If it is, what makes it
bad anyway?”
Plato’s Dialogue - Euthyphro:
 “Is conduct right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right?”
– Plato, Euthyphro
CULTURAL PRACTICES:
Because of these culture practices, some people was led to believe that morality is relative
to culture and tradition.
– Moral Relativism - Believes that there is no absolute universal moral standard. (What is right
for some might be wrong for others. Despite our differences, none of us are wrong. The same
action can be right or wrong depending on one’s culture and belief.)
 Sati – Burning a wife alive with her dead husband. A cultural practice in India.
 Seppuku/Harakiri – Feudal Period in Japan, a practice of Samurais (Military) in the act of
taking one’s own life (form of suicide) to redeem honor.
 Female Infanticide - Killing unwanted female babies (A practice in Ancient China, India,
and Pakistan)
 Bride Kidnapping – India and Africa and other parts of the world.
 Polygamy – In Muslims

– Moral Absolutism – Believes the opposite of moral relativism, it is the belief that there is an
absolute universal moral standard. And Reality is independent of our cultures and beliefs.
“REALITY is independent of our culture and beliefs.”
“Is truth similar with moral principles?”
“Can we equate moral principles with truth?”
“Can we claim the same objective argument with respect to morality?”
“Is morality objective?”
“Is conduct right regardless of one’s culture and belief?”
- We, humans, love to justify existence.
IMPORTANT PROBLEM/FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM IN ETHICS:
“What makes right as right and wrong as wrong?”
- We cannot deny the reality when the truth already presents itself when we can already
see the object in front of us.
 SOCRATES AND PLATO
SOCRATES
- He was the teacher of Plato
- He is the principal interlocutor of the dialogues that Plato wrote in his book.
- He occupied himself with ethical questions solely by means of conversations in small
groups where Plato happened to be one of his great students.
- In Plato’s writings, Socrates’ life was presented on – “Analogy of Socrates”

o Apology of Socrates:
 The speech that Socrates gave when he was accused of not believing in
Gods and corrupting the minds of the young by introducing new gods.
 Apologia means “defense” in Greek.
 He was convicted and sentenced to death after his unsuccessful defense.
 Socrates’ death because of the injustices led Plato to realize something
about human nature: “Humans are prone to the widespread resistance to
unsettling ethical reflection, which can be considered as a defect.”
 It is Plato’s rendition of what Socrates said in his speech for defense.
PLATO
- He was a known Philosopher from Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BC.
- He was regarded as the founder of systematic moral and political philosophy.
- The first person to systematically write a philosophical writings about the fundamental
ethical and political matters.
- Plato was one of the students of Socrates.
- His way of delivering his philosophical questions are in the medium of a literary form,
which is THE DIALOUGE.
THE DIALOGUE:
o It was written by Plato about 2,400 years ago and it has over 1,600 pages.
o It is a device where Plato advocates his own point of view and convey his convictions.
o It must only be used as focal points for conversations by exposing our own ideas to
the cross-examination of others.
o It is meant to signal readers that face-to-face discussion should be the principal tool
by which Philosophy and moral philosophy should be learned.
o The principal interlocutor in the dialogues is Socrates or the main/leading speaker in
many of his dialogue.
o Plato presented and recommended doctrines that are worthy of consideration and has
great plausibility, just like the philosophies of Socrates.
Socratic Dialogues – term that suggests that Plato is more indebted to Socrates than in the other
works.
 Groups of Plato’s Dialogues: (Divided by his students into 3)
o Early, Middle, and Late Dialogues:
o Late dialogues:
 The Law: Sophist (Sophistry), Statesman (Statecraft), Philebus, Timaeus,
and Critias.

o Early Dialogues:
 Socratic Dialogues: Charmides (Moderation), Euthyphro (Peity), Ion,
Laches (Courage), Lysis (Friendship), Hippias Major (Beauty), Hippias
Minor, Protagoras.
 Short Dialogues of Socrates about difficulty of an issue rather than its
solution that ended in perplexity.
 Other dialogues: Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Gorgias
 The epistemological assumption made throughout the early dialogues is that ethical
knowledge is to be acquired in the same way that all craft-knowledge is acquired: by
sustained and careful reasoning that draws upon and organizes our experience.

o Middle Dialogues:
 Ethics and Metaphysics: Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic (Justice), and
Symposium
 These four have strong ethical content combined with a serious dose of
metaphysics. (Concept of the nature of reality)
 Meno – Socrates believe that we must separate our soul from our body to
enjoy the vision of the truth in order to understand the nature of virtue. Plato
then began to combine the study of ethics with the examination of
metaphysics and epistemological issues.
PLATO’s early writings of his dialogues: (March 27, 2023)

 He doesn’t mark the word “ethical” (or Moral) as a distinctive subject matter.
 ‘Ethe’ – character
 He has no doubt that religion plays an important role on human life but he does not believe
that religious experience or priestly authority might be the source of ethical knowledge.
 Thinking – forms or ideas (Forms are simply properties)
 He agrees to Socrates’ ideas…
SOCRATES IN PLATO’S DIALOGUES:
 Virtue or Excellence (arête) – What is good, or what is fine(Kalon – “Beautiful” or “Noble”
o Justice
o Courage
o Wisdom
 Virtues: Justice, Courage, and Wisdom – absolute priority over all other goods
o Socrates’ Principle: One must not act unjustly
o “Egoism” – The ultimate justification for what anyone does must be for their own good
and that they should treat others well only if doing so can be shown to be in one’s own
interest.
o Gorgias - A virtuous person is just like a person who has a skill or broad knowledge
about what is virtue and knows how to apply it. A just person is someone who has
studied justice and learned about the human soul just like how a doctor learns about the
human body. (One must have a full theory of a certain thing in order to define
something in a manner of having knowledge about it and not by merely using the words
in order to answer something in an ethical manners.)
o Apology of Socrates – Sense of exasperation of humans; improving one’s
understanding of the ultimate end of human like.
o MORAL EXPERTISE – one must have mastery of the concepts of justice, goodness,
and virtue in order to justify their beliefs to others.
 Moral expertise - is an ideal that all human beings must strive to achieve.
 (Meteorological phenomena involving a question asking about what heat is or what a
rainbow is - Science of Ethics)
 “The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
o SOUL or “Psyche” – (Responsible for the mental states of human beings; thought,
emotion, deliberation, sensation, and the likes. – A soul might be a special kind of body.
It is immortal because it is not made up of any material which is therefore not
vulnerable to decay or decomposition.)
o Protagoras – Can virtue be taught?
 Should pleasure be our ultimate goal?
o Phaedo – immortality of the soul
 BODY – it is a prison where the soul has temporarily taken up residence.
 DEATH – death is not evil; it is an opportunity for the soul to escape to
improve its understanding of the forms.
o Ideal Society – a society ruled by philosophers that understands the most important
form of all which is the form of good. The ruler must be someone who can grasp what
the forms of justice, beauty, and goodness are – they will be able to see what must be
done to enhance the justice, beauty, and goodness of the everyday world.
  Republic – Definition of virtues according to Plato/Socrates:
o Three parts of the Soul: (Human soul is not unitary)
 Reason – capable of looking after the good of the whole soul, and so it
should govern the rest.
 Spirit – houses our propensity to seek social distinction (victory, honor,
angry domination), must be trained to become an ally of reason.
 Appetite (Appetitive) – our worldly desires as humans (by virtue of which
we seek food, drink, sex, and the means for their satiation (including and
especially wealth), must be tamed in a way that makes us healthy, vigorous,
and restrained.)
- Spirit is manageable and Appetite is not, so we must let our Reason control our actions
and decisions that we make to manage our emotional and appetitive nature.
o Perfectly Just City/Ideal City – Composed of Decision makers, Defenders from
enemies, and Producers of material resources – Threefold division of the ideal social
world just like the structure of the human soul. When there’s unity in the three parts,
each doing its own functions, just like the human soul: (Justice is each doing its own.)
o Justice – the harmony of the parts of the soul.
o Second-Best City – (Ruled by law rather that Philosophers)
 Social Harmony – what makes a good for the community
 Plato’s Idea – if we can understand what goodness is, we would be able
to confirm the hypothesis that justice, being a harmony of parts of the
soul, is good, because goodness is a proper balance or proportion among
parts.

Plato’s Definition of Goodness:

 His identification of goodness with order, harmony, measure and kindred notions has
not been accepted universally.
 Aristotle insisted that Plato sought the good abstractly (high level of abstraction) and
he recommended that we should focus our attention on the human good.
 Platonic Claims: (These are claims of Plato that got accepted about moral thinking until this day)
o First: We should strive to achieve something that is good; in the sense that it is
worthy of our desire because it is good.
o Second: We better make sure that we know what goodness is – (The property
that good things have in common.)
 ARISTOTLE
Aristotle’s ethical writing (Practical Philosophy – Nicomachean Ethics (NE))
 Aristotle’s aim for his investigation: is to know how to become good – not to know
what goodness is, in contrast with the writings of Plato.
 His account of human value is grounded in his metaphysics.
 Fundamental question in ethics: (An assumption that Plato and Aristotle both share)
o “How should one live?”
o “How can one achieve the best possible life?”
 Self-regard – standpoint that is fundamental to Aristotle ethics (Same with Plato – but
it is a form of self-regard for altruism: concern for another for the other’s sake; and for
self-sacrifices.)
 Eudaimonia – (Supreme Good) it is the ultimate goal of human’s life, according to
Aristotle.
 (Happiness, flourishing, or well-being)
 “Living well and doing well”
o Conditions that the supreme good must satisfy:
 Pursued not for the sake of something else
 It is self-sufficient to make life choice-worthy and complete
o FUNCTION ‘ergon/ergos’
 “Humans are rational animals.”
 RATIONAL ELEMENT: (In human personality)
o Intellect
 Practical function/role: shapes and directs the appetites
o Appetites (Desires) – Human’s desires are responsive to practical reason
(Rationally responsive appetites)

 HUMAN GOOD:
o The activity of the soul in accordance with excellence (Excellent employment
of rationality)
o Aristotle believes that, there are more ways to employ rationality excellently.
o “In accordance with the best, the most complete.”
Types of Excellence:
 Virtue of character
o Stable state of character that is responsive to a given motivation or motivations.
o Courage to fear, boldness, temperance to the desires of bodily pleasures.
o Goodness of character requires the right fit between reason and motivation.
(Types of excellence) INTELLECTUAL EXCELLECE: (function)
 Practical intellect (Phronesis) – with view to living well as a whole.
o Has a higher intrinsic value than theoretical intellect and it is the best
excellence that’s attainable by human.
 Theoretical intellect (Sophia) – instrument in promoting practical intellect
o Aspect of human nature which most closely approaches divine nature (not
possible).
“Both kinds of excellence are valuable BUT not equally.
“Humans are creatures that require a social environment to fully develop.”
 Two other topics that Aristotle talked about other than the types of excellence is about
PLEASURE and FRIENDSHIP.
PLEASURE:
o It is a necessary part of the best life.
o It is not just about the basic pleasure source of humans;
 Ex: Food, drinks, and sex.
FRIENDSHIP:
 No-one would choose to live without friends, even if he possessed all the other goods.
 The best kind of friendship, one values the other for themselves, as opposed to valuing
them as god tennis partner or business colleague.
 Aristotle – “Valuing friends for their good character is the best type of friendship and
it is only possible between good people (in short, virtuous people).”
 Aristotle believes that friendship based on character is necessary for the ideal life.
 “A friend is another self.”

Aristotle’s ethics in self-regarding standpoint: (Genuine altruism)

- The good person will sacrifice for their friend, because Aristotle believes that a good
person is a “Self-lover.”
- But a virtuous person is not totally selfless. For Aristotle, self-sacrifice promotes that
one’s friend’s good for its own sake gives a person’s life the right kinds of shape and
therefore can contribute in achieving eudaimonia.
(Sir Oliver and Ma’am Kate’s Lectures about Aristotle’s ethics)
ULTIMATE PURPOSE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE:
- According to Aristotle, the ultimate purpose of a thing lies in its proper function.
- The proper function of a thing can be known in its activity.
- Our purpose can be determined by examining our proper function as human being.

“Every action and choice, seem to aim at some good.” –Aristotle

- One does action that has a good end or purpose.

Apparent Good – seems good but only to the doer.
Example: Rapists who thinks that raping must be good because it makes them feel good,
only for themselves.

Two types of end/purpose:

1. Pursued not for the sake of something else
2. Pursued for the sake of something else
- Both endings differ – end which are pursued for the sake of something else.
- None of these ends is chosen for the sake of itself and it is not the human purpose.
 The ultimate purpose of human life must be the end in itself…
o If there is an ultimate purpose, it must have been the highest good, good in itself.
o It must be self-sufficient and deficient in nothing.
EUDAIMONIA (Happiness): Ultimate goal/Chief good
 Our proper function, according to Aristotle, is happiness. (Ultimate purpose of human
existence)
 EUDAIMONIA: Happiness, living well, and doing well
o Aristotle’s idea/notion of happiness is far beyond the temporary feelings and
emotions. It is also not like an episodic phenomena/movement of your life, it is
your whole story.
o Happiness requires virtue:
o Virtue – about promoting the concept of living well
– “Living well is acting well.” – Terrence Erwin
 “In order to be happy, we need to live ethically.” – Aristotle
 According to Aristotle, happiness is some kind of activity of the soul in conformity
with virtue.
 We must participate or do anything to be happy and take action.
 “A happy person must be a virtuous person; the vicious can never be happy.”
 It is an activity of the soul, beyond the physical experience; completion of life.
Two parts of the soul: (Aristotle’s)
o RATIONAL
 Speculative – (Responsible for knowledge)
 Practical – Decision making / Action
o IRRATIONAL
 Appetitive – Desires
 Vegetative – (responsible for breathing – consciousness)
“Both rational and irrational part of the soul should be balanced.”
VIRTUE AS MODERATION:
 Deficiency, Excess, Moderation, Vices, Virtue
Virtue – it is the mean and it is targeting the median.
In Ancient Greek, archery is used as an analogy to describe virtue as moderation or
hitting the proper mark.
Aristotle’s notion: “The virtue of the mind or intellectual virtue and the moral virtue.”
DEFICIENCY (Vice) MEAN (Virtue) EXCESS(Vice)
Cowardice Courage Recklessness/Rashness
Short temper Gentleness Apathy
Grouchiness Friendliness Obsequiousness
Shamelessness Modesty Shy
Stinginess Generosity Extravagance

 COURAGE IS A VIRTUE – Recklessness and cowardice are vices

“The man who shuns and fears everything and never stands his ground becomes a coward,
whereas a man who knows no fear at all and goes to meet every danger becomes reckless.”
– Aristotle
Coward – The man who shuns and fears everything and never stands his ground.
Reckless – The man who knows no fear at all and goes to meet every danger.
 FRIENDLINESS IS A VIRTUE – Grouchiness and obsequiousness are vices
Grouchiness – not wanting friends
Obsequiousness – being too friendly
- Friendliness is a rational choice – “Virtue is a rational decision.”
 Friends who shares the same virtue.
 GENEROSITY IS A VIRUE – Stinginess and Extravagance are vices
Stinginess – not giving
Extravagance – giving too much
CHARACTER (INTELLECTUAL PRUDENCE):
o A virtuous person requires Prudence.
 PRUDENCE – Goal directed thoughts concerned with action. (Practical Wisdom)
o “A state grasping the truth involving reason, concerned with action about things
that are good or bad for a human being.”
o A virtue between moral character and practical virtue (intellectual).
o The wisdom we can utilize in practical life’s experience.
“Most of our actions can’t be undone.”
 “Choices in life needs intellectual virtue, or prudence; in order to make the right
decisions.” - Intellectual – reason – learn
 “Moral virtue is formed by habit.” - Habitual practice
- It is a character; something we do regularly.
- It is not merely your action that matters, but what kind of person you are.”
“Character is an expectation.”
 Virtue as character – Practice; Habitual (“Ethos”)
Function – “Ergon” (excellence) – action

Socrates (Teacher of Plato)

– > Plato (“When one has knowledge about what goodness is, they are already virtuous.”)
– > Aristotle (“You need to do virtuous actions habitually.”)