Professional Ethics

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...

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...

Applied ethics is a discipline of philosophy that attempts to apply ‘theoretical’ ethics, such as utilitarianism, social contract theory, and deontology, to real world dilemmas. Topics falling within the discipline include medical ethics, legal ethics, environmental ethics, computer ethics, engineering ethics, media ethics, corporate social responsibility, or business ethics. Ma ny considerations of applied ethics also come into play in human rights discussions. Applied ethics seeks to engage formal ethics in attempts to solve actual dilemmas. In so doing, it illuminates the potential for disagreement over the way theories and principles should be applied. Strict, principle-based ethical approaches often result in solutions to specific problems that are not universally acceptable. Drawing on medical ethics for an example, a strict deontological approach would never permit the deception of a patient about their condition, whereas a utilitarian approach would involve con...