Historical Developments of Traditional and Modern Ethics Essay

The discipline of ethics, also called moral philosophy, encompasses systematizing, defending, and recommending views of right and wrong behavior. Philosophers today typically segregate ethical theories into three universal subject matters: metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Metaethics explores where our ethical doctrines come from, and what they mean. Are they simply social innovations? Do they entail more than idioms of our individual emotions? Metaethical responses to these queries focus on the issues of universal realities, the will of God, the function of reason in ethical judgments, and the significance of ethical terms themselves. Normative ethics stands on a more practical task, which is to come up at moral standards that control right and wrong demeanor. This may require articulating the good habits that we should acquire, the duties that we should follow, or the consequences of our behavior on others. Finally, applied ethics involves probing precise controversial issues, such as abortion, infanticide, animal rights, environmental concerns, homosexuality, capital punishment, or nuclear war. By employing the theoretical tools of metaethics and normative ethics, deliberations in applied ethics try to resolve these controversial issues. The lines of distinction between metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics are often unclear. Each thoughtful person ought to be concerned about and fascinated in ethics. For the Christian, being moral is critical to a life that seeks to honor God. A lot of decisions made on a day-to-day basis entail questions of right and wrong. Ethics supply the basis on which one makes those decisions and the root of a moral choice is often as vital as the choice itself. Yet, few people have thought through the way they rationalize their conceptions of right and wrong. Ancient moral theory tries to offer a reflective account of an indispensable human activity so one can grasp what is of primary value in pursuing it. In historical order, the theories that influenced modern ethics today sprung from those of Socrates as offered in specific dialogues of Plato; Plato in the Republic; Aristotle; the Cynics; Cyrenaic hedonism; Epicurus; the Stoics; and Pyrrhonian skepticism. Ethics has been employed to economics, politics and political science, leading to quite a lot of distinct and unrelated fields of applied ethics, consisting of business ethics and Marxism. American corporate scandals such as Enron and Global Crossings are descriptive of the relationship between ethics and business. Ethics has been connected to family structure, sexuality, and how society examines the roles of individuals; leading to several distinct and unrelated fields of applied ethics, including feminism. Ethics has been applied to war, leading to the fields of pacifism and nonviolence. Often, such endeavors take legal or political shape before they are recognized as works of normative ethics. Of all the areas of philosophy, ethics is the one that seems most pertinent to us and it is no overstatement to say that everyone is engaged in ethical thought at most times in their lives, knowingly or otherwise (Newall, 2005).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   If ethical consideration is widespread as suggested above then it should come as no surprise that there were many thinkers in the past that put forward their ideas and tried to improve on what came before them. Numerous notions of ethics in the ancient world were based on or prejudiced by the Greeks, particularly Plato and Aristotle. The former thought that people were disposed to be good and desired happiness; the dilemma was to know what would bring about that good in the first place. Some philosophers used God as their foundation, others reason and still others both, but the leaning throughout was that the aim was attainable.   The history of this time is too complex for our purposes here; suffice to say that this movement continued: thinkers explicitly or implicitly influenced by the three assumptions tried to create systems while those who were not disagreed with them, sometimes with other propositions. Reference: Anscombe, Elizabeth â€Å"Modern Moral Philosophy† (1958), Philosophy, 1958, Vol. 33, reprinted in her Ethics, Religion and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). Newall, Paul .The Galilean LibraryEthics (2005)http://www.galilean-library.org/int11.html.