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...

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...

Ethics: - Ethics is a branch of philosophy that attempts to help us understand which ways of life are worth following and which actions are right or wrong. Ethics addresses questions of right and wrong using reason rather than faith or tradition. The discipline of ethics has three branches: normative ethics, meta-ethics and applied ethics. Normative Ethics: - Normative ethics is the branch of ethics that asks general questions about the morality of behavior; it attempts to provide general moral norms of behavior. Normative: - A normative statement, or question, or theory, concerns how things should be, how they ought to be, rather than how they actually are. [The opposite of “normative” is descriptive: A descriptive statement, or question, or theory, concerns how things actually are, not how they ought to be.] So normative ethics is the branch of ethics that tries to answer general questions about how we should behave, how we ought to act. In other w...

Arriving at a short list of representative normative principles is itself a challenging task. The principles selected must not be too narrowly focused, such as a version of act-egoism that might focus only on an action’s short-term benefit. The principles must also be seen as having merit by people on both sides of an applied ethical issue. For this reason, principles that appeal to duly to God are not usually cited since this would have no impact on a nonbeliever engaged in the debate. The following principles are the ones most commonly appealed to in applied ethical discussions: Personal benefit: acknowledge the extent to which an action produces beneficial consequences for the individual in question. Social benefit: acknowledge the extent to which an action produces beneficial consequences for society. Principle of benevolence: help those in need. Principle of paternalism: assist others in pursuing their best interests when they cannot do ...