YOU BETTER BE GOOD! IT'S THE SEASON

How do you know what it is to be good?

As a philosophical discipline, ethics and morals are concerned with human conduct and how they are applied by judgments of what is right or wrong, good or bad.  How to behave to the benefit of self or toward one’s fellow man, is a matter of making choices - to be friendly or unfriendly; to tell the truth or lie; to be generous or greedy. 

Ethics and morality are words often interchanged and essentially provide the same meaning for most individuals.  Ethics is derived from the Greek ethos, meaning “Character,” and morals from the Latin mores, meaning “Custom.” 

Federal and state laws and public justice are closely related to ethics, in that they determine and enforce definite rights and duties.  They also attempt to repress and punish deviations from these standards.  Most societies have set standards, whether by custom or by law, to enable those in a society to live together without undue disruption.  It is possible for law to be neutral in moral issues, or it can be used to enforce elements of morality.  The prologue to the United States Constitution says that insuring domestic tranquility is an object of government.  This statement is morally neutral.  Such laws as those passed to prevent the taking of a life by others, however, promote a moral, as well as legal commitment.

Ethics, as a branch of philosophy, is considered a normative science, because it is concerned with norms of human conduct, as distinguished from the formal sciences, such as mathematics and logic, and the empirical sciences, such as chemistry and physics.  The empirical social sciences, however, including psychology, impinge on the concerns of ethics in that they study and promote social behavior.  For example, the social sciences frequently attempt to determine and influence the relation of particular ethical principles to social behavior and to investigate the cultural conditions that contribute to the formation of such principles.

Worldly philosophers have attempted to determine goodness in conduct according to two chief principles, and have considered certain types of conduct either good in themselves or good because they conform to a particular moral standard.  The former implies a final value, which is desirable in itself and not merely as a means to an end.  In the history of ethics, there are three principal standards of conduct, each of which has been proposed as the highest good:  happiness or pleasure; duty, virtue, or obligation; and, perfection, the fullest harmonious development of human potential.  Other than Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey, I know of no other mere mortals who have achieved “perfection.”

For the Christian, the authority invoked for good conduct is the instruction from God.  For worldly societies, it is the pattern of nature or the rule of reason.  When God is the authority, obedience to the divine commandments is the standard of conduct.  If the pattern of nature is the authority, conformity to the qualities attributed to human nature is the standard.  When reason rules, behavior is expected to result from rational thought.

So much human activity is simply a matter of custom or habit, where little thought may be given to many actions.  There is a great deal of behavior, however, in which people are conscious of why they act in a certain way.  They are confronted with the need to make choices.  At the basis of choice, two questions arise:  “What good do I seek?” and “What is my obligation in this circumstance?”  To those ends, the concept of “ethics” is primarily concerned with attempting to define what is good for the individual and for society.  It also tries to establish the nature of obligations, or duties that people owe themselves and each other.  Philosophers have said for thousands of years that people do not willingly do what is bad for themselves, but may do what is bad for others, if it appears that good for themselves will result.

There have always been differences in defining what is good and how one should act to achieve it.  Christian instruction has maintained that God defines what is good or righteous, and to seek that objective, one must follow His commandments.  Some of the world’s philosophers have concluded that achieving pleasure is the greatest good.  Other secular philosophers have pointed to knowledge, personal virtue, or service to one’s fellow man as a means of realizing goodness.  Consequently, secular philosophies have allowed individuals and entire societies throughout history, to conduct outrageous criminal acts upon people and justified doing so on the basis of some greater “good.”

The difficulty in deciding what “good” and “obligation” are, has led philosophers of moral instruction to divide into two camps.  One says that there are no definite, objective standards that apply to everyone.  They assert that people must decide what their duties are in each new situation.  Others have said that there are biblical standards, which apply to everyone; what is good can be known.  If the good is known, the obligation to pursue it becomes clear.  The position that insists there are no such norms, is called ethical or situational relativity.

So, who do you think makes the rules? – God or man?  To be continued…

Topics:

Christian Ethics

Humanism

Hedonism

Existentialism

Relativism

Self-Realization