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