1 what is ethics?

• ethics is the study of goodness of human character or the principles of what is right and wrong in human character

• ethical lives are ones lived according to ethical principles not lives based on self-interest and expediency.

• some ethical principles are local but many more apply without regard to time, culture, politics, religion & ethnicity.

• we will also use the word morals in this course. While there is a technical difference between ethics & morals we will give them the same meaning in this course

2 what is applied ethics?

• applied ethics is a part of ethics that focuses on specific, controversial moral issues such as abortion, animal rights, & euthanasia. Applied ethical issues have tended to be subdivided into convenient groups such as medical ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics, sexual ethics, & social ethics

• generally speaking two features are necessary for an issue to be an applied ethical issue:

  (i) the issue needs to be arguable in the sense that there are significant groups of people both for & against the issue at hand. The issue of shooting someone is not an applied ethical issue, since nearly everyone agrees that this is very wrong. But the issue of abortion is an applied ethical issue because there are a large number of people for & against it

  (ii) the issue must be a moral issue. The media covers many sensitive issues such as capitalistic vs. socialistic business practices or public vs. private health care systems. Although these issues are controversial & have an important impact on society, they are not really moral issues. They are issues of social policy. Social policy aims to help make a society run efficiently by making conventions, such as traffic laws, tax laws, & zoning codes. Moral issues, by contrast, concern other things such as lying or killing that are not confined to individual societies. Frequently, social policy & moral issues overlap. However, the two groups of issues are often quite distinct.