Ethics. The term "ethics" is derived from the Greek ēthos, which means "custom" or "usage". It has basic affinities, therefore, with similar notions in non-Western cultures, such as China, where the Confucian term li, meaning "propriety" or "courtesy" or "decorum" has the same fundamental significance. The Greeks, e.g., Plato, used the term dikē, meaning also "custom" or "usage" to designate the right way of behaving, very much as Confucius used the term li in Chinese. All these terms reflect, of course, a very conservative attitude toward ethical questions. Good conduct is what Victorian English schoolboys called "good form", i.e., conforming to the traditions and customs of the society in which one lives. Confucius saw li as reflecting a cosmic li, a right way such as follows or corresponds to the way the entire universe is run.
The adjectives "ethical" and "moral" are synonymous and philosophers who concern themselves with ethical problems have been sometimes known as "moral philosophers" as contrasted with logicians, metaphysicians, and other specialists. Moral philosophers may either build systems for guidance in reaching ethical decisions, i.e., decisions about what course of action is good or bad. They also analyze what is to be meant by "good" and "bad", "right" or "wrong". Modern ethics tends more in the latter than in the former direction, but both functions are necessary in the pursuit of ethical questions. Ethics as a whole belongs to value theory, which includes aesthetics and other branches. Some moralists (e.g., Kant and H. A. Pritchard; who may be called "deontologists") hold that duty is prior to value and that certain duties, e.g., the duty to keep a promise, are independent of values. Teleologists, such as utilitarians, contend that our only duties are those that refer to ends or consequences.
The most fundamental term of all in ethical discussions is the term "good", but this term abounds in ambiguities even greater than Socrates long ago noted and made central to some of his expositions as Plato recounts them. The term is logically attributive, i.e., it is applied to a particular object or situation, e.g., the qualities that make a good shoe are very different from those that make a good razor. So on hearing the term "good" we naturally ask, "good for what"? Birds are good for cats, but cats are bad for birds. Those goods that are traditionally called intrinsic goods are good for their own sakes or as ends; those that are called extrinsic are good as means to ends. Others are good only through their contribution to a complex whole, e.g., a patch in a patchwork quilt, and may be called contributory goods. Kant held that nothing can be called good without qualification except a good will. C. I. Lewis held that only experiences can be intrinsically good.
In religious thought a distinction arises (exemplified in the Bible) showing two radically different understandings of what goodness means: (1) goodness may be represented as bestowed by God, so that our task is to try so far as we can to preserve it, as one may be said to try to keep a white shirt clean and white to the end of the day. (2) goodness can be conceived, rather, as an attainment through toil and tribulation. The latter is plainly implied in the vision in the Apocalypse (Revelation) of the 144,000 redeemed who have passed through great tribulation and, having washed their clothes in the Blood of the Lamb, stand before the throne of God with the palms of victory in their hands. The former, by contrast, is implied in the account in Genesis of the fall of Adam and Eve from the state of innocence in which God had created them: a radically different concept.
Again, what is called Ethical Objectivism is the view that the good and the right stand for an objective factor in things, while Ethical Subjectivism is the view that they are subjectively posited. Ethical Naturalists hold that the good and the right can be known as natural objects can be known, so that empirical verification and falsification can be provided in ethics as in empirical inquiries. Ethical Intuitionists deny that and contend that the good and the right are known intuitively and cannot be demonstrated by such means. A fundamental distinction must be noted between those who regard the basic moral category as duty and those who see it hedonistically as the aim to achieve a goal such as happiness. Jeremy Bentham, for instance, took the aim of ethics to consist in the pursuit of that which achieves the greatest good for the greatest number. Many see all ethical inquiries as relativistic to culture, e.g., suicide may be accounted a virtue in one society while another society condemns it as a vice. Adam Smith saw sympathy as the foundation underlying all ethical judgments.
Virtually all religions express in one form or another the notion ("Golden Rule") that one ought to do to others as one would wish others to do to oneself, but such injunctions demand clarification. A mother very rightly sings a lullaby to help her child to go to sleep; she does not act as she would expect the child to act towards her. So, to the Golden Rule we must add some phrase such as "in identical circumstances." But are circumstances ever strictly identical? Again, Jesus tells us how to tell a good tree from a bad one: the good tree bears good fruit. But are we always able to know good fruit from bad? Satan is said to be skillful at disguising himself as an angel of fight. Hence the ancient Christian collect in which one prays for those things "which for our unworthiness we dare not and for our blindness we cannot ask." Kant, agnostic though he was in respect to knowledge of the thing-in-itself, since we see only phenomena, was more confident about the moral knowledge we can have and which he expressed in the principle of the Categorical Imperative. It may be, however, that in the long run we need as much agnosticism in moral as in epistemological inquiries.
ethics
There is no Buddhist term which exactly corresponds to ‘ethics’ as a branch of philosophy concerned with the analysis and evaluation of conduct in the way the subject is classified in the West. Instead, the various rules of moral conduct are subsumed under the rubric of śīla, which denotes internalized moral virtue and its expression in practice as abstention from immoral conduct. As far as monks are concerned, the Vinaya provides an externally enforced code for the regulation of communal life.
ethics : (adj.; nt.) nītisattha. (m.) ācāravidhi; guṇadhamma.
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