Ethics and Ethical Theories

Definition/Description

Ethics is one of the philosophical disciplines concerned with understanding human behavior in the context of morality. Sometimes ethics is also called moral philosophy. Concerning method, ethics can have a descriptive method in which “that what is” is described in the context of human moral behavior and a normative method in which “that what should be” is at the center. Ethics as a philosophical discipline has various goals, but they can be listed as follows: understanding human action in the moral context and providing guidelines on human morally right action. Ethics meets its goals in several ways: (1) by providing a description of human action, (2) by helping to understand the essence of human action in regard to moral qualities, (3) by providing guidance for decision-making in order to act in a morally correct way, and (4) by providing insight in what is considered to be specifically humane way of acting. In the course of history, three most influential...