Ethics

Ethics may be defined as the knowledge of moral values and duties or as the study of the ideal human character, actions, and ends. The term may also refer to a treatise on morals. Every religious tradition advocates high standards of human behavior, and in that sense, all religious communities have a moral component. The concept of “ethics,” however, emerges from the Western philosophic tradition. For this reason, this entry will first consider the development of this idea in Western philosophy and then explore the parallel forms of moral reasoning in the diverse religious traditions.

Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics is surely one of the earliest treatises on the subject, thought of ethics as a “practical” science. In this sense, ethics is distinguished from “theoretical” inquiries such as physics as well as from “productive” sciences such as sculpture. In comparison with the former, ethics focuses on acts performed in view of a goal or an end (a telos). The acts chosen may hit or miss the mark; also, human beings are able to choose better and worse goals. The distinguishing characteristic of the kinds of action of interest in ethics, then, is that these deal with things that “could have been different.” By contrast, the distinction between ethics and the productive sciences is that the goal is not to make a “finished” product. Rather, the goal is to live in a certain way, so that the end of ethics is itself found in the living of a good life.

This means that the science or knowledge sought in the study of ethics is, in some sense, a moving target. Furthermore, it implies that ethics cannot, or at least should not, seek to establish certainties of the type aimed at in physics. As Aristotle had it, a reasonable person does not demand more certainty than is possible, given a certain subject matter. The only thing certain in ethics is that one must grant the possibility that there is such a thing as good behavior; the inquiry is therefore about the ways in which human beings might distinguish this kind from other sorts.