Friday, December 13, 2013

Ethics : Determining the rightfulness of human actions.

 

Ethics is a branch of the science of Philosophy that tries to determine if a human action , behavior or costume can be considered right or wrong. 
  This science sparked a series of controversies that root their origin in the following statement : Can we make a ethical judgement in a purely objective way? If we take in consideration the statement that tells us that we are the product of our experiences , we might come to the conclusion that objectivism itself is a artificial concept. 
  The objective perspective forces us to not use our personal value scale ,which is homogeneous mixture between our genetic setup and personal experiences, being the validation tool of our mental framework . 
   When we analyze things from a objective perspective we assimilate a foreign value scale in our attempt to conduct the validation process , this value scale is the reflection of the most high rated values of the society which a shared by a big number of its members.  
   Individuals often face difficulties when they have to internalize this values scale and make abstraction of the one that they inherited from the environment in which they developed , often the two scales having a very different set of values incorporated in them .
  As I mentioned earlier , validation is a key step of ethical judgement , the result of this judgement must take the form of a single , clear , generally know value (good , bad ; right , wrong ; beautiful , ugly , etc.) . As humanity evolved over the course of history , groups designed prohibitive laws which banned members from doing specific actions or adopting a certain of behavior . 
   We can state that the first sings of ethical thinking are most clearly noticeable at the moment of apparition of primitive normative systems. Ethic principles translate in to laws , norms and rules , if we take the general ethic principle of general good it translates in to laws that ban crimes , stealing , corruption , etc.
   As human economic activity evolved from hunting and agriculture to services and industry , so did ethics , translating its principles in to rules that assure social balance within a economic sector. 
    Ethics slowly developed a more pragmatic side named Deontology , which is the branch of ethics that regulates every human profession , being a collection of rules that are intend to limit any unproductive practices that may cause material or spiritual losses . 
  If we take a moment to analyze the historical development of ethics we notice that in Antiquity and the Middle Ages there was a very fine line between it and religious morality , we can state that there was in fact no real border between this two , ethics being assimilated as a theological discipline . 
    Nowadays ethics is viewed as a distinctive discipline , as a result of secularization in many of the world's states , even so , ethics still analyzes many subjects that are common to the science of theology .  Laws are the tool used by ethics to translate its principles , ideas , theories in to our day to day lives , all of this can be grouped in a couple of categories :
1.  Laws that are based  on religious believes.
2.  Secular laws.
3. Prohibitive laws.
4. Descriptive laws.
5. Laws for internal organization.
6. General laws.
7. Temporary laws.
  A collection of laws make up a normative/law  system , the features that laws have are the result of a series of influences such as : population structure , history , environment , religion , economy , etc. Because of this we can't find two states in the world that share exactly the same laws , but we can find regions in which we find law typologies that have a high distribution . 
  In this case ethics serves as a framework for the design of a normative system , the general ethic principles that a society hold will be translated in the laws of the state.
   As a conclusion we can state that ethics is a crucial component of a society's framework , it is a dynamic set of principles that members use in their analysis of events and in the judgment of people , they vary over time , constantly being influenced by a series of factor that decide if they go out of use or survive for the next generation to use.



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