Ethics, Morals

1. Ethics

2. Morality
• The word morality comes from the Latin word moralis,
which means "manners" or "customs". Morality is a set of
values and principles that guide people to act in a way that
is considered right or good.

3. • Moral values are a set of principles that help people
distinguish between right and wrong. They also help people
develop a sense of responsibility for their actions.
• Examples: Honesty, respect, fairness, etc

4. • Values are the beliefs that guide how people act, and can
help people build self-confidence. People often adopt the
values they learn from their culture and family.
•
Values are individual beliefs that motivate people to act one
way or another. They serve as a guide for human behavior.

5. • Ethics is based on 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.

6. • Some years ago, sociologist Raymond Baumhart asked business
people, "What does ethics mean to you?"

7. • "Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong."
"Ethics has to do with my religious beliefs."
"Being ethical is doing what the law requires."
"Ethics consists of the standards of behavior our society accepts."
"I don't know what the word means."

8. • Like Baumhart's first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their
feelings. But being ethical is clearly not a matter of following one's feelings.
• A person following his or her feelings may recoil from doing what is right. In
fact, feelings frequently deviate from what is ethical.
• Nor should one identify ethics with religion.
• Most religions, of course, advocate high ethical standards. Yet if ethics were
confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to religious people.
• But ethics applies as much to the behavior of the atheist as to that of the devout
religious person.
• Religion can set high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for
ethical behavior. Ethics, however, cannot be confined to religion nor is it the same
as religion.

9. • Being ethical is also not the same as following the law.
• The law often incorporates ethical standards to which most citizens subscribe.
• But laws, like feelings, can deviate from what is ethical.
• Our own pre-Civil War slavery laws and the old apartheid laws of present-day
South Africa are grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from what is
ethical.
• Finally, being ethical is not the same as doing "whatever society accepts."
• In any society, most people accept standards that are, in fact, ethical.
• But standards of behavior in society can deviate from what is ethical.
• An entire society can become ethically corrupt. Nazi Germany is a good example
of a morally corrupt society.

10. • The word Ethics is derived from the Greek word ‘ethos’ which means character or
conduct.
• Ethics is also called as moral philosophy or philosophical thinking about morality.
• This morality has been further elaborated as action and behaviour which is concerned
with ‘good’ or ‘evil’, of particular traditions, groups or individual.
• Ethics is that science which is concerned with moral behaviour or with right or wrong
and good or evil of human behaviour.
• It propounds those principles which make our conduct moral. It becomes clear when we
explain the derivation of the words right and good.
• The word right is derived from Latin word ‘rectus’, which literally means ‘straight’ or
‘according to rule’.
• It means that we are concerned with those principles which make our conduct right or
straight.