Ethics

Chapter One
A. What is ethics?
B. Nature of moral statements
C. Morality and other normative subjects
D. The issue of ethical relativism
 Basic concept and issues
• Ethical or moral questions are inevitable.
• Any ethical or moral question is intended to
address a practical, abstract, personal or
social problem.
 A. What is ethics?
The differences between ethics and morality:
• These two are usually interchanged or confused
from each other.
• Morality is a set of standards of a person
determining what is right or wrong.
• Morality is not only a person’s standards but a
particular society’s standard.
• Ethics is the discipline that examines the moral
standards of the individual or a society.
• In a sense, ethics is the study of morality.
• It looks into soundness, reasonableness or
appropriateness of an ethical standard.
• It is one thing to accept or adopt a set of moral
standard, another is to reflect and examine these
standards.
According to the great sophos Socrates:

“An unexamined life is not worth

living”.
Three main areas (or subfields) of
ethics
1. Metaethics – also known as analytic ethics.
• An abstract and detached way of thinking
philosophically about morality.
• Attempts to shed light on the basic concepts, ideas
and assumptions that underlie moral beliefs and
judgments.
2. Normative ethics – concerned with moral
standards to determine right from wrong conduct.

• It involves formulation of moral norms or rules

that can serve as basis of the kinds of actions,
institutions and ways of life that we should pursue
(e.g. consequentialism, deontology and virtue
ethics).
3. Applied ethics – focuses on more practical issues
by using philosophical methods to determine the
moral permissibility of specific actions and
practices.
• Areas this subfield confines were on diverse fields
such as public policy and professions, from recent
decades like business, medicine, environmental
policies, law, media, and personal concerns such
as life, health, sex and relationship.
*Descriptive ethics – not an area of moral
philosophy.
• It endeavors to present what people think about
what is right and wrong, how they behave and how
they reason about ethics. It incorporates
researches in the fields of anthropology,
psychology, sociology or history.
• Descriptive ethics is not considered a
philosophical study of ethics since it does not aim
to establish what should be the case. It aims to
establish what the case is. It describes or explains
the world rather than prescribe how the world
should be.
• Ethics is not descriptive, it is normative. Ethics
(philosophy) asks how people should live,
descriptive ethics (anthropology) asks how people
in fact live.
 B. Nature of moral statements
• A moral statement is normative than factual or
descriptive. A normative statement expresses a
value judgment, that claims something ought to be
the case as distinct from a factual that claims
something is the case.
• When one makes a normative statement, he or she
presents an evaluative account of how things should
be rather than what things are.
 Examples of normative assessment
Normative statement Basis of assessment

You ought to return the excess change Moral standard

to the cashier.

There should be unity, balance and Aesthetic standard

contrast in your painting.

You ought to use preposition “in” rather Grammatical standard

than “on”.

It is illegal to make U-turn there. Legal standard

Cover your mouth when you laugh. Standard of etiquette

 Examples of factual assessment
Factual statement Basis of assessment

The Philippine Independence day was Historical research

declared on June 12, 1898.

Some tribes in India practice Observation

cannibalism.

The cause of the fish kill in the river is Scientific research

pollution from agricultural waste.

A blue litmus paper will turn red when Experiment

dipped in an acid solution.
• A moral statement is not a factual one although
providing facts may significantly justify a moral
claim, however remains insufficient.
• Consider this argument:
According to a study of ten countries that enforce
the death penalty, the rate of criminality in these
countries went down after it has been enforced.
Therefore, it is morally right to enforce the death
penalty.
• Above claim is insufficient, facts need a moral
principle or standards such as, “An act is right if it
promotes the greater good of the people”. Thus, the
moral argument should be:
Imposing the death penalty will lower the rate of criminality in our
society and thus will be beneficial to the greater number of people.
An act is right if it promotes the greater good of the greater
number.
Therefore, imposing the death penalty is right.
• The second statement is not a factual one, but this
was used to justify the first factual claim.
• Although some people can accept the reduction of
crime due to death penalty, they may still hold
position that the right to life of a human being is
sacred and inviolable, therefore can still find death
penalty as morally unacceptable.
• One accepts a moral claim by not looking on facts alone.
One agrees on the basis of what he or she believes in –
e.g. pursuing greater good or respecting right to life.
• Factual disagreements are easier to settle than
disagreements on morality.
• It is a mistake to assume all moral statements are
difficult to justify such as the claims: “It is morally wrong
to torture a person for fun” and “It is morally right to
give aid to typhoon victims”.
• Also, not all factual claims are easy to resolve or
uncontroversial, factual claims like “Humans evolved
from primitive primates”, “Imposing death penalty will
deter murder” and “Aliens from other planets have
visited the earth”, their truth or falsity is hard to
establish.
• What is clear are the bases of the acceptability of these
statements, factual statements from empirical data
through research and observation and moral statements
that appeal to norms and standards.
 Moral statements and standards
• A moral statement is normative.
• However not all normative statements appeal as
moral. Examples of these normative statements
are etiquette, legal, aesthetic, grammatical
standards, et. al.
 Nature of moral standards
1. Moral standards deal with matters that we think
can seriously harm or benefit human beings.
• The conventional moral norms against
cheating, lying, killing deal with actions that
gravely hurt people in as much as helping,
letting people be free and happy benefit them.
2. Moral standards have universal validity
• This is exemplified by the moral rule: “Do not do
unto others what you would not have them do unto
you”.
• Another example is, if we believe killing a person
is morally wrong, then we expect that people in
other places follow the same belief regardless of
culture or religion.
3. Moral standards are generally thought to have a
particularly overriding importance, that is, people
feel they should prevail over other values.
• A violation of the moral rule against killing or
stealing is more important than violation of the
rules of etiquette or grammar.
• Moral claims are also more important than claims
pertaining to law.
4. Moral standards are not established by decisions
of authoritarian bodies, nor they are solely
determined by appealing to consensus or
tradition.
• Validity of moral standards lies on the adequacy of
reasons that support or justify them. So long these
reasons are adequate, the standards remain valid.
C. Morality and other normative subjects
1. Morality and etiquette
• Etiquette refers to the set of rules or customs that
determine the accepted behaviors in a particular
social group.
• Etiquette is concerned with proper behavior while
morality is on right conduct. Etiquette is arbitrary
and culture-based.
2. Morality and law
• Breaking the law is not always immoral. Following
the law is not always moral.
Example: If your relative suffers an illness that needs
immediate medication you can violate traffic rules
by exceeding speed limit or not following traffic
lights.
• Abortion, gambling, prostitution, euthanasia may
be legal to some countries but they remain an
issue.
• Janet Napoles, the mastermind behind PDAF
scams invoked her right to self-incrimination,
legal but such act jeopardizes truth and justice,
therefore morally questionable.
• Since laws are derived from morality, people tend
to equate what is lawful to what is moral.
• Laws may be enacted, amended or repealed by
legislators to protect their vested interests, and may
not really be beneficial to the general welfare.
• One great instance is the Anti-political dynasty bill
that remains pending despite efforts to become a
law as it is detrimental to the legislators benefiting
from concentration of power.
3. Morality and religion
• In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates asks the pious Euthyphro,
“Do the gods love goodness because it is good or is it
good because gods love it?”
• This question raises some serious problems: First, moral
directives from religion are general and ambiguous.
• Example: “Thou shall not kill” according to Christians but
it becomes a disagreement to particular and complex
issues such as abortion or euthanasia.
• Second, which religion should we inquire? There
should be a basis of morality that transcends
religious boundaries, lest we fail to carry out an
objective rational moral discussion with people
from the standpoint of religion.
• Third, it is a disservice to ourselves if we rely to
the dictates of religion.
 D. The issue of ethical relativism
• Ethical relativism – holds that all moral principles are
valid to a particular society or individual.
• This is to be distinguished from:
1. Ethical skepticism – claims there are no valid moral
principles at all (or at least we cannot know whether
there are any); and
2. Ethical objectivism – asserts there are universally
valid moral principles binding all people.
 Two forms of ethical relativism
1. Cultural ethical relativism or ethical
conventionalism – rightness or wrongness
depends on society’s norms.
2. Individual ethical relativism or ethical
subjectivism – rightness or wrongness of an
action lies on the individual’s own
commitments.
• Ethical subjectivism follows the view of Protagoras
that “man is the measure of all things”.
• An unfavorable corollary of this position is that
nobody must be held accountable for any actions as
we alone are the arbiters of our moral judgments.
• Morality has to do with resolving interpersonal
dispute or conflict among individuals to promote good
life, something an individual relativist cannot do.
• Conventionalism is different from subjectivism
since it recognizes the social nature of morality.

• Although it rejects the existence of universal moral

principles, it claims that there are valid moral
principles justified by virtue of their cultural
acceptance.
 Attractions of moral relativism
1. Diversity argument – premised on the factual or
empirical claim that moral beliefs and moral rules
vary from culture to culture.
• Example: Eskimos practicing infanticide and
leaving feeble, old members in the snow to die is
contemptible to many cultures except the Eskimos.
2. Dependency argument – premised from the fact of
moral diversity holding that moral beliefs are true
or valid only relative to certain groups.
• We are simply culturally-determined creatures.
• Hard-relativists claim that even sciences are
cultural, magic cannot be inferior to science as it
is culturally contextual.
3. Toleration argument – according to this reasoning,
relativism may be the right way of looking at
morality since it offers the promise of tolerance
and understanding, attitudes that most of us value
highly.
• Each society is to be judged in terms of its own
standards rather than in terms of other people’s
ethnocentric expectations.
 Challenges of ethical relativism
1. If the premise is true, the conclusion cannot be
inferred to be true.
• Diversity and disagreement in moral beliefs do not
prove that morality is relative.
• We cannot accept differences or disagreements in
moral beliefs and practices as justification for the
relativism of morality.
2. It has negative implications.
• We cannot turn a blind eye to such violent action
and regard it as a matter of cultural difference
that must be accepted.
• We ought to express our objection and
condemnation to certain cultural practices that
mar human dignity (Madison, 2003).
• For society to achieve moral progress, it has to be
self-critical and put its own social norms into
question.
• This can only be done if social norms themselves
can be subjected to critical scrutiny, rather than
regarded as the ultimate basis of morality.
• Example: Revolutions for Independence, Suffrage
movements, Anti-slavery and racism movements,
Labor movements, etc.
3. Despite the fact that some moral beliefs and
practices vary among cultures, there are still
universal moral standards that exist.

• Though people have different cultures, customs,

traditions, religions and ideologies, they still have
something in common emanating from their
shared humanity.
• Respect for life, pursuit for truth and justice,
desire for peace, to cite some, are values that all
human persons, no matter how primitive or
sophisticated their culture or civilization is, would
recognize and acknowledge as worth pursuing.
Reference:
• Evangelista, Francis Julius N., Mabaquiao Jr.,
Napoleon M. Ethics (Theories and Applications).
Mandaluyong: Anvil Publishing, Incorporated,
2020.