LaVonne Maupins's List: Ethics

• • good point

• What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to   well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought   to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness,   or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that   impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder,   assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that   enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And, ethical standards   include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right   to freedom from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate   standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well-founded reasons.  

  Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical   standards. As mentioned above, feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate   from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one's standards   to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics also means,   then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our   moral conduct, and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we   help to shape, live up to standards that are reasonable and solidly-based.

• • Moral principles that govern a person's or group's behavior.
  • The moral correctness of specified conduct.

• Ethics defines the elements essential to human well-being and proposes principles to be used as guidelines for generating an ethical culture. Ethics also refers to the specific values, standards, rules, and agreements people adopt for conducting their lives.
• Ethics, most broadly, is the study of human behavior and its consequences in the light of what is ideally possible. For example, ethicists might study a society's mores or morals to determine what effect they would have on humankind if they were used as universal standards.
  
• What does it mean to act ethically?
   
   Ethical Culture proposes that the state of spiritual-ethical harmony would be created whenever people live by these three guidelines taken together:
   
   
  • Act as a member of an ideal ethical culture with a sense of interdependence with humanity and nature.
   
  • Act so as to achieve your own full and unique potential.
   
  • Act so as to elicit the best and most distinctive qualities in others and thereby in oneself.

1 more annotation...