1. FUNDAMENTALS OF ETHICS
In this chapter, we discussed Socrates and the value of questions that
affect how we should live. We learned why we must examine our life,
and why an “unexamined life is not worth living”. We learned how
Socrates made his investigations through a process referred to today
as the Socratic Method. We also defined Ethics as the study of
methods and principles used to distinguish good from bad, right
from wrong actions.
There are four general reasons why we need to study Ethics:
1) Ethics makes clear to us why one act is better than another
2) Ethics contributes an orderly social life by providing humanity
some basis for agreement, understanding some principles or rules
of procedure
3) Moral conduct and ethical systems, both of the past and the
present, must be intelligently appraised and criticized
4) Ethics seeks to point out to men the true values of life.
Ethics has two basic assumptions: one, that man is a rational being, and
two, that man is free. These basic assumptions affect the degree of our
moral responsibility. We discussed the two objects of Ethics: the
physical object or the doer of the act, and the nonphysical object or the
act done by the doer. The nonphysical object of Ethics has two types,
the acts of man and the human acts. Because it has moral value, moral
acts or human acts are said to be the formal object of Ethics.
This chapter also dealt with the three general classifications of the
nonmaterial object of Ethics: moral (ethical), immoral (unethical) and
amoral (neutral). Components of the moral act were also presented and
discussed: the means and the end. End and consequence were also
differentiated.
As to the forms of ethical analysis, we discussed two: descriptive and
normative ethical analysis. Descriptive ethics is used in the social
sciences, while most philosophers believed that ethics is, for the most
part, normative. Normative ethics includes the following theories:

2. Consequentialist (Teleological) Ethics, Nonconsequentialist
(Deontological) Ethics, Authoritarian Ethics, Ethical Egoism, and the
Situational Ethics. Uncertainty or conflicts of opinion about what ought
to be done give rise to three general forms of ethics: Practical Ethics,
Theoretical Ethics and Skepticism. The difference between Social and
Personal Ethics was also discussed. But it was pointed out that Personal
Ethics is necessarily social because it can only be understood when put
in its proper socials context.