LECTURE NOTES 1

Prepared by: Zacarias G. Damo, Jr.

(For private use only)

We are moral persons. This means that we consider some actions as either good/right, bad/wrong based
on standards (or reasons) which we learned from various social units such as family, school and
church/religion. Notice that in the preliminary activities (if you did these seriously), it is likely that the
reasons you provided for determining whether an action is good/right or bad/wrong came basically from
the aforementioned units of society.

Our course is Ethics.

Ethics is defined as a philosophical discipline that studies morality.

Morality is the set of standards or reasons for determining if an action must be/ought to be done because
it is good/right, or be avoided because it is bad/wrong. Some of these standards are accepted and
followed without questions. Others are ignored due to some reasons, like the childhood rules in your
preliminary activity #2 which you stopped to obey as you have become more mature.

I will not explain the aforementioned definition of ethics further yet. To prepare you to understand it
better, we will discuss first some key concepts, and come back to this definition later. For discussions on
key concepts, I will upload modules and lecture notes.

Modules contain standard parts like learning outcomes, learning inputs, activities and assessment tools.
For each module, please take note if activities are required or optional, that is these may not be
submitted/graded. Be that as it may, you are encouraged to do these activities to facilitate better learning.

You will find Module 1 titled, Bawal Judgmental in the next section. This is the first module that will
prepare you to understand the definition of Ethics which we will discuss fully later (as I mentioned above).
However, those who like to have an overview of what Ethics is all about may want to watch this video:

https://youtu.be/Rr7U49RPpTs

(yes, this is optional, but may be of help if you try).

REFERENCE:

Mabaquiao, Napoleon Jr. M. and Francis Julius N. Evangelista. 2020. Ethics: Theories and Applications.
Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing, Inc.