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Ethics Aristotle Laws
Ethics is the general term to determine what is good or right and the best way to react in a situation. For example, you are a reporter of the local campus newspapers. The lecturer of Moral Studies in your college has been involved in a minor accident. You are assigned to do a report on that accident. When u arrived at the accident scene, you found several pornographic magazines and videos at the back of the lecturer’s car. Your deadline is due in an hour’s time. What would you do?
You were not asked is it legally right in this situation. You were not asked how the majority would react, instead you were asked to take the best course of action in this situation. Will you react according to your feelings? Will you do just what higher authorities told you to do? Or you will choose to obey the laws and regulations? How do you decide what’s the best action to be taken? Or what’s the best method to use to analyze these kinds of situations?
There are many situations where we are torn between what to do or what not to do. These situations normally don’t involve laws and regulations, instead it deals with what is good for the individual and for the society, or what is the best solution that benefits all.
Get help with your essay from our expert essay writers...In this topic, we will discuss about personal ethics, internal controls, performance codes, informal controls and outside influences that controls the mass media.
History
Greeks was the first to seriously begin the formal study of ethics, followed by the Romans. The important ethicists at that time were Plato, Socrates and Aristotle who developed ethical naturalism. The world ethics was first used by Aristotle, who made the first serious and systematic study of moral principles. It was then further developed by Epicurus and the epicurean movement. The subject of ethics had great influence in the writing of Hebrew Bible.
The formal study of philosophy only continued after the medieval era with new writers such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and Maimonides. Debate between ethics based on divine and natural law at that time gained a new importance.
Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant and David Hume started the modern western philosophy. Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill followed their footsteps later on. Friendrich Nietzsche disagree with previous theories of ethics and launched an assault against it. Jean Paul Sartre developed existentialism. Some modern philosophers who have done serious philosophical writing such as analytic ethics include G.E. Moore, W.D. Ross, C.L. Stevenson and A.J. Ayer.
References
http://san.beck.org/EC1-Ethics.html
http://www.wacklepedia.com/e/et/ethics_1.html
http://www.bioethicscourse.info/lecsite/ethicsintro.html
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