Ethics, Philosophy , and Moral Systems(Part A)

Damavand Mountain. Iran, Tehran


Today, I'm taking a mandatory ethics class online required by the company I work for. Be that as it may, I'm taking this opportunity to discuss a very important issue that has impaired most of Islamic world to understand the West. Much is talked about the ignorance of the West of the cultural norms and ethics of the Middle East, however, I'm here to argue that the Middle Easternes are equally ignorant of the cultural norms and ethics that guide Westerners' behaviors and lives. Unfortuantely, most Middle Easterners equate what they see in Hollywood movies like Bay Watch as the true life style of Westerners.

Muslims might benefit to recognize what they consider right or wrong is based on set of principles and rules of conduct that they have been taught by their religion and culture and they are by and large religious codes of conducts, which are set in stone (koran, which is viewed by muslims as a Miracle in and of itself). Muslims incessantly accentuate the "otherness" of humanity and do it systematically via concepts such as "ummah" or "infidel". As if , there is a cluster of muslim cells that go through meiosis and build the DNA strand of each muslim differently than the infidel's or the non-ummah 's DNA. If "ummah" as a msulim construct is not institutionalized racism, I don't know what is? Who are the real beneficiaries of such a division? The answer: the institutionalized muslim Clerical establishment both Sunni and Shia.

In many parts of the non-Western world there is such loathing of everything associated with the West - especially America - that anyone living such a lifestyle is inherently depraved and somewhat less than human. This dehumanizing view of the West, as seen by its enemies, is what is called Occidentalism. They see the West as " a mass of soulless, decadent, money-grubbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites, or at least that's what they are told to believe by their clergies and priests in Friday's sermons and mosques across the most of the muslim world. The Ayatollahs call the US, "The World-Eating or the World-devouring America"( Aamrikaa-ye- Jahan-Khar in Pesian) while America is one the most generous countries in the world though it's not run on a non-profit organizational charter either.

I hope you find this discussion interesting and useful or maybe not...

Defining Ethics:

In pursuit of this goal I will briefly overview the philosophical study of right and wrong--that is, a brief overview of the branch of philosophy that is called "ethics". We will begin by disucssing what Ethics is, and what its basic subjects are. Once we have a reasonably clear view of what what ethics is and how it is distinctive, we will look at two basic theories about how to distinguis right action from wrong action: Consequentialism and duty-based ethics.

One final point: A great deal of complicated philosophical work has been dedicated to the topics. We can only scratch the surface of this issues, and by necessity oversimplify some of the ideas and theoris we discuss.

Most simply, ethics is the branch of philosophy that is concerend with right or wrong--we can think of ethics as the study of right and wrong. This sounds straightforward but it's rather complicated because it's not always clear what actions are right. Even when we agree about what someone should do, we might not agree why that is the right thing to do. Even though, ethics is a branch of philosophy, one need not be a professional philosopher to have meaningful discussions about ethics. In fact, most of us have discussions about ethics regularly.

In addition our understanding of ethics can be complicated by confusion surrounding its basic terminology. For example: "ethics" is not the same thing as "an ethic".
An ethic is a code, a set of principles or rules of conduct that help to define right and wrong. These codes come in many forms. For example, a Person might have a personal ethic, one that he or she developed independently. He or she aslo may have adopted the ethic developed by hir or her religion, or perhaps created by a different kind of group, like a professional code of ethics. A person might use all 3 sorts of code to guide his or her behavior. As long as the various codes don't conflict with one another.

You can see that logical thing to call multiple codes of this is "ethics"--as in the sentence, "She subscribes to diverse ethics"--but we need to be careful when we use "ethics" this way. Mostly, we need to make sure that we remember that ethics (understood as a branch of philosophy)is not just a collection of various codes and principles.

So, ethics as a branch of philosophy, goes further than any collection of codes--It also seeks to develop the resources we need to compare and evaluate various codes of conducts, and the criteria we need to distinguis and effective code from a poor or a confused code.

"Ethical" or "Moral"

Further confusion is created by some people's belief that there is difference between the terms "ethical" and "moral". These are just both adjectives meaning "right according to some set of principles or codes of conduct". The sentence "that act is moral" means the same thing as the sentence "that act is ethical". There is no formal or technical distinction between these terms.

A morality is just a moral system or a code of conduct; it need not contain any resources for understanding or critiquing itself, though some do. This kind of understanding and Critique is the project of ethics, and the part of ethics that studies moral systems is called "Moral Theory".

Distinguishing Value Judgments From Judgments about Matters of Fact:

There is an important difference between facts and values. For example, if I ask you whetehr it's raining; you could, for example, look out a window, or perhaps check a weather report.

For example, if I ask you whether stealing is wrong, however, it is not nearly so clear how you should go about finding the answer to this question. "Wrong" is no a judgment regarding a matter of fact--it's a judgment about the moral value attached to certain sort of conducts. No amount of searching for data out in the world will tell us conclusively whether an act is right or wrong. You might be able to tell me that theory X or individual Y says that stealing is wrong, but that is no really an answer to my question. Just as "so and so says it's raining" would not have really answered my question about whether it was raining.

So, ethics is not a science. The work of ethics is not based on gathering data in the world--It consist largely of constructing arguments to support various claims.
Because this is true, ethical codes and moral arguments are perspective--they prescribe courses of action for us to follow, they tell us what we should do or how things should be. Ethical codes and moral arguments are not descriptive, that is that they don't aim to convey matters of facts or to describe how things actualy are. They may include facts incidentally, but their conclusions are always perscriptive. This is in sharp contrast to Sharia laws which cannot be questioned and discussed because they are sent by G-d and placed in Koran or quoran; hence, rendered indisputible questioning their veracity is blasphemy.

Much of the philosophical work of ethics is dedicated to providing the reasoning to support a particular view of what it means for an act to be wrong or right--that is this work focuses on constructing the arguments that would show whether an act is right or wrong. This reasoning is critically important because reasoning is what sets ethical judgment apart from statements of mere opinion.

To be continued...