Professional Ethics

Normative ethics, Meta-ethics and applied ethics (medical, business, engineering, legal ethics etc) are all branches of the discipline called ethics , which is in turn a branch of the discipline call philosophy . “Philosophy” derives from the Greek words for love ( philo ) and wisdom ( sophia ). For the ancient Greeks, “philosophy” was love of wisdom. But while this might give us the beginning of an idea of what philosophers do today, we need to get more specific to really understand what modern philosophy is. [Caveat: not all modern philosophers would agree with the following explanation of philosophy. Interestingly, the nature of philosophy is itself a controversial issue among philosophers.] Philosophy is an area of inquiry . Inquiry is an attempt to discover truths about the world. In this way, philosophy is like the sciences, historical research, investigative journalism and detective work. But philosophy is different than these other areas of...

What is Ethics? A few years ago, sociologist Raymond Baumhart asked business people, “What does an ethic mean to you?” Among their replies were the following: “Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong.” “Ethics has to do with my religious belief.” “Being ethical is doing what the law requires.” “Ethics consists of the standards of behavior our society accepts.” “I don’t know what the world means.” These replies might be typical of our own. The meaning of “ethics” is hard to pin down and the views many people have about ethics are shaky. Ethics and Feelings: Like Baumhart’s first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings. But being ethical is clearly not a matter of following one’s feelings. A person following his or her feelings may recoil from doing what is right. In fact, feelings frequently deviate from what is ethical. Ethics and Religion: - Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most r...

Consistency—the absence of contradictions—has sometimes been called the hallmark of ethics. Ethics is supposed to provide us with a guide for moral living, and to do so it must be rational, and to be rational it must be free of contradictions. If a person said, “Open the window but don’t open the window,” we would be at loss as to what to do; the command is contradictory and thus irrational. In the same way, if our ethical principles and practices lack consistency, we, as rational people, will find ourselves at a loss as to what we ought to do and divided about how we ought to live. Ethics requires consistency in the sense that our moral standards, actions, and values should not be contradictory. Examining our lives to uncover inconsistencies and then modifying our moral standards and behaviors so that they are consistent is an important part of moral development. Where are we likely to uncover inconsistency? First, our moral standards may be inconsistent with ach other...

The Descriptive VS the Normative Normative: A normative statement, or question, or theory, concerns how things should be, how they ought to be, rather than how they actually are (a.k.a. evaluative prescriptive) The opposite of “normative” is: Descriptive: A descriptive statement, or question, or theory, concerns how things actually are, not how they ought to be (a.k.a.factual) Ethical Sentence or Normative Statement: We need to define an ethical sentence, also called a normative statement. An ethical sentence is one that is used to make either a positive or a negative (moral) evaluation of something. Ethical sentences use words such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘moral’, ‘immoral’, and so on. Here are some examples: ‘Rashad is a good person.’ ‘People should not steal.’ ‘The Simpson verdict was unjust.’ ‘Honesty is a virtue.’ ‘One ought not to break the law.’ In contrast, a non-ethical sentence would be a senten...