Noun

ethics (uncountable)

1. (philosophy) The study of principles relating to right and wrong conduct.
2. Morality.
3. The standards that govern the conduct of a person, especially a member of a profession.

Ethics (also known as moral philosophy) is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good vs. bad, noble vs. ignoble, right vs. wrong, and matters of justice, love, peace, and virtue.

Major branches of ethics include:

• meta-ethics, about the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions and how their truth-values (if any) may be determined;
• normative ethics, about the practical means of determining a moral course of action;
• applied ethics, about how moral outcomes can be achieved in specific situations;
• moral psychology, about how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what its nature is; and
• descriptive ethics, about what moral values people actually abide by.

Within each of these branches are many different schools of thought and still further sub-fields of study.

Ethics (from the Ancient Greek "ethikos", meaning "arising from habit"), a major branch of philosophy, is the study of value or quality. It covers the analysis and employment of concepts such as right, wrong, good, evil, justice and responsibility.

Sourced

• The most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given. The so-called psychological or empirical ethics manage to establish themselves only by introducing surreptitiously some flaw within the manthing which they have first defined.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)

• Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
  • Jean Cocteau, in Diary of an Unknown (1988)

• Strong ethics keep corporations healthy. Poor ethics make companies sick. Values are the immune system of every organisation.
  • Patrick Dixon, in Building a Better Business (2005), p. 131

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Sat Jul 17 22:15:43 2010