noun
definition
The study of principles relating to right and wrong conduct.
definition
Morality.
definition
The standards that govern the conduct of a person, especially a member of a profession.
Examples of ethics in a Sentence
Ethics is in much the same position.
Ethics have gone out the door and greed is in.
The metaphysics of Aristotle, the ethics of Spinoza, the philosophical works of Cicero, and many kindred works, were also frequent subjects of study.
His great work was the Theologia moralis et dogmatica, a compendium in catechetical form of Roman Catholic doctrine and ethics which has been much used as a students' text-book.
In ethics empiricism begins by recognizing that man possesses sensations, and so is liable to pleasures and pains.
Really, he urged, there could be only one substance - Descartes himself had dropped a passing hint to that effect - and the bold deductive reasoning of Spinoza's Ethics, in process if not in result, betrays its kinship to the ontological argument, with its affirmation of what must be.
In ethics he anticipated much of the teaching of Tolstoy; in doctrine he often appealed to the authority of Wycliffe; and in some of his views it is possible to trace the influence of the Waldenses.
His work embraces in its scope many psychological and more strictly metaphysical discussions, but it is chiefly in connexion with ethics that Tucker's speculations are remembered.
In reasserting and amplifying the empirical conclusions of his predecessors, especially in the sphere of ethics, Mill's chief function was the introduction of the humanist element.
This ethical teaching, which is indefinitely higher and purer than that of the Old Testament, is yet its true spiritual child, and helps to bridge the chasm that divides the ethics of the Old and New Testaments.
Against this work and the Ethics of Spinoza the orthodox Cartesians (who were in the majority), no less than sceptical hangers-on like Bayle, raised an all but universal howl of reprobation, scarcely broken for about a century.
Perhaps in the department of thought where it is most in earnest - in ethics - it is an idealism.
The introduction to this translation, published under the title of Buddhist Psychology, contains the fullest account that has yet appeared of the psychological conceptions on which Buddhist ethics are throughout based.
The quotation may remind us that the analogy between ethics and mathematics ought to be traced further back than Locke; in fact, it results from the influence exercised by Cartesianism over English thought generally, in the latter half of the 17th century.
A cosmopolitan on principle, and a convinced disbeliever in the ethics of his day, he comes very near to modern empiricism and especially to the modern Hedonist school.
It is true, nevertheless, that love as a prelude to marriage finds only a small place in Japanese ethics.
Lastly, when we once have freed ourselves from the antipathy engendered by his severance of ethics from the field of politics, when we have once made proper allowance for his peculiar use of phrases like frodi onorevoli or scelleratezze gloriose, nothing is left but admiration for his mental attitude.
He excelled in logic, the theory of knowledge, ethics and physics.
If the recognition of physics and logic as two studies coordinate with ethics is sufficient to differentiate the mature Zeno from the Cynic author of the Republic, no less than from his own heterodox disciple Aristo, the Cleanthes.
Hall's International Law, and more at length in an interesting paper contributed by John Westlake to the International Journal of Ethics, October 1896, which its author has reprinted privately.
Secondly, the Eudemian Ethics, while not agreeing with Plato's Republic that the just can be happy by justice alone, does not assign to the external goods of good fortune (Eutu X ia) the prominence accorded to them in the Nicomachean Ethics as the necessary conditions of all virtue, and the instruments of moral virtue.
His ethics, too, have a religious character.
The first department of ethics, on the other hand, is the branch of the subject in virtue of which ethics forms part of philosophy.
Moreover, much work of the highest importance in ethics in modern as well as ancient times has been completed with but scanty, if any, reference to the subject of the freedom of the will, or upon a metaphysical basis compatible with most of the doctrines of both the rival theories.
On account of the conflict of opinion in ethics we cannot hope to obtain certainty upon all questions; still reflection will lead us to discard some of the conflicting views and find a reconciliation for others, and will furnish, on the whole, a practically sufficient residuum of moral truth.
On the whole, there is probably no treatise so masterly as Aristotle's Ethics, and containing so much close and valid thought, that yet leaves on the reader's mind so strong Transi= an impression of dispersive and incomplete work.
Partly, no doubt, the limited influence of his disciples, the Peripatetics, is to be attributed to that exaltation of the purely speculative life which distinguished the Aristotelian ethics from other later systems, and which was too alien from the common moral consciousness to find much acceptance in an age in which the ethical aims of philosophy had again become paramount.
This theological view of the physical universe had a double effect on the ethics of the Stoic. In the first place it gave to his cardinal conviction of the all-sufficiency of wisdom for human well-being a root of cosmical fact, and an atmosphere of religious and social emotion.
The two systems that have just been described were those that most prominently attracted the attention of the ancient world, so far as it was directed to ethics, from their Later almost simultaneous origin to the end of the 2nd Greek century A.D., when Stoicism almost vanishes from our philo- view.
We find no development worthy of notice in Aristotelian ethics (see PExIPATETICS).
The fundamental differences between pagan and Christian ethics depend not on any difference in the value set on rightness of heart, but on different views of the essential form or conditions of this inward rightness.
Yet Locke's ethical opinions have been widely misunderstood; since from a confusion between " innate ideas " and " intuitions," 'which has been common in recent ethical discussion, it has been supposed that the founder of English empiricism must necessarily have been hostile to " intuitional " ethics.
Thus, on the whole, the impressive earnestness with which Clarke enforces the doctrine of rational morality only rendered more manifest the difficulty of establishing ethics on an independent philosophical basis; so long at least as the psychological egoism of Hobbes is not definitely assailed and overthrown.
Their characteristics are further considered in the History of Ethics, p. 186 seq.
We may take this latter treatise as representing the first in the development of English ethics, at which what were afterwards called " utilitarian" and " intuitional " morality were first formally opposed; in earlier systems the antithesis is quite latent, as we have incidentally noticed in the case of Cumberland and Clarke.
A reaction, in one form or another, against the tendency to dissolve ethics into psychology was inevitable; since mankind generally could not be so far absorbed by the interest of psychological hypothesis as to forget their need of establishing practical principles.
The truth is that the construction of a scientific method of ethics is a matter of little practical moment to Reid.
And, in fact, "private ethics, " as conceived by Bentham, does not exactly expound such a system; but rather exhibits the coincidence, so far as it extends, between private and general happiness, in that part of each man's conduct that lies beyond the range of useful legislation.
Ethics shows how to realize internal freedom by resolutely pursuing rational ends in opposition to those of natural inclination.
And both evolutionary and idealistic ethics agree in repudiating the standpoint of narrowindividualism, alike insist upon the necessity of regarding the self as social in character, and regard the end of moral progress as only realizable in a perfect society.
It was in Herbert Spencer, the triumphant " buccinator novi temporis," that the advocates of evolutionary ethics found.
His own contribution to ethics was vitiated at the outset by the fact that he never shook himself free from the trammels of the philosophy which his own system was intended to supersede.
The fact is that any close philosophical analysis of Spencer's system of ethics can only result in the discovery of a multitude of mutually conflicting and for the most part logically untenable theories.
He is hampered by a distinction between " absolute " and " relative " ethics definitely formulated in the last two chapters of The Data of Ethics.
Absolute ethics would deal with such laws as would regulate the conduct of ideal man in an ideal.
Relative ethics, on the other hand, is concerned only with such conduct as is advantageous for that society which has not yet reached the end of complete adaptation to its environment, i.e.
A similar criticism might fairly be passed upon the majority of philosophers who approach ethics from the standpoint of evolution.
They begin, for the most part, with a belief that in ethics as in other departments of human knowledge " the more developed must be interpreted by the less developed " - though frequently in the sequel complexity or posteriority of development is erected as a standard by means of which to judge the process of development itself.
Perhaps the one European thinker who has carried evolutionary principles in ethics to their logical conclusion is Friedrich Nietzsche.
For he saw clearly that to be successful evolutionary ethics must involve the " transvaluation of all values," the " demoralization " of all ordinary current morality.