Introduction

Before you begin, ask yourself where does your sense of right and wrong come from?
What is morality? Where does it come from? How do we truly know what is right and wrong? In this lesson, we will start to analyze those questions. Maybe you have various
answers to the question above, such as parents, religion, or culture. But let's look deeper. Your parents aren't always right, and people have different values. People have different
religious beliefs, and some people aren't religious at all. Cultures vary as to what is right and wrong. So how can we say we know what right and wrong is? That is the question
for ethics, and so we will begin in lesson 1 by looking at some terms and definitions, followed by some toughts on the nature of morality. For instance, is morality objective
(things are either right or wrong, independent of what anyone thinks about them)? Or is it subjective (dependent upon what you or I or our culture thinks, believes, or feels about
it)? The text and the notes below provide some introductory questions and information about the study of ethics.
ETHICAL TERMS AND APPROACHES
TERMS
1. Ethics
comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning character
in philosophy, refers to the study of morality
in ordinary language means the same thing as morality (i.e. "John is moral", "John is ethical")
2. Morals
comes from the Latin moralis, meaning customs and manners
3. Immoral
opposite of moral, or a judgment of wrong ("War is immoral")
3. Amoral
having no moral sense or being indifferent to right and wrong (Sometimes serial killers are said to be amoral if they don't understand right from wrong)
4. Nonmoral
Good and Bad used in ways outside the realm of morality (i.e. "my car is good", "this steak is good")
APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF MORALITY
1. Descriptive Approach
Trying to describe factually how certain behavior is ("we all in fact do act out of self-interest", "Survival of the fittest is the law of nature"). These, of course, may or may
not be true, but the idea is that you are just describing rather than making a value judgment.
2. Philosophical Approach
A. Normative Ethics: judgments of right/wrong, good/bad, often involves words like 'should' or 'ought' ("we all should act out of self-interest", "he ought to treat her
better")
B. Metaethics: analyzing language of ethics or the foundation of ethics ("the word 'right' might be just a word used to describe a feeling that we get in certain situations",
"there can be no one theory for all of ethics")
Examples:
"Tim was wrong to take that piece of cake" - Normative: invloves judging something as right or wrong
"The term wrong really just means creating more unhappiness than happiness" - Metaethics: analyzing what the term wrong means.
"Ethics ultimately rests on what one's conscience says is right and wrong" - Metaethics: analyzing the foundations of ethics
"You were right to dump that loser, he was a jerk" - Normative: judging right and wrong
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