Ethics Lessons

Ethics are learned beginning at a young age.

Ethics is a broad term that encompasses codes of right and wrong that societies attempt in inculcate into their members. Ethics can vary among times and places, but transgressing the ethics of your own time and place can potentially lead to social censure or more serious punishment. Ethics are the broad societal codes that are built upon the individual moral codes of a society's members.

Personal Ethics

The ethics of individuals can vary quite widely, a fact that leads to social conflict when different ethical systems collide. Most individuals' personal ethical systems are based on ideas of cooperation, altruism and prohibitions against causing unnecessary harm. But behavior in everyday life can vary significantly from purported beliefs, depending on how strongly a person adheres to his own stated ethical beliefs. Some areas where personal ethical beliefs are most strongly held include sexual behavior, drug use, prohibitions against stealing and lying, and generosity toward those in need.

Business Ethics

The subject of ethics in business in a contentious one, and central to many of the debates that take place within a capitalist economic system. The basis of corporate capitalism is the corporation's ability to provide dividends to its shareholders. Ideally, this goal is accomplished within ethical parameters prohibiting exploitation and dishonesty. In practice, businesses can go very far off the ethical rails, as was exhibited by the massive Enron scandal in 2001. When the lure of large sums of money overpowers ethical business standards, some people succumb to temptation and transgress both ethics and legalities in pursuit of money.

Environmental Ethics

In response to increasingly serious environmental challenges such as climate change, ocean depletion and loss of species habitat, environmental ethics is moving closer to the center of many people's concerns over what is right and wrong. Unlike the ethics of interpersonal behavior, the idea of environmental ethics is new enough that it has not become a social norm, and thus it can be a point of contention. Environmental ethics includes ideas about causing pollution, using animals, depleting resources and destroying the necessary habitats of other species. The growing concern over environmental ethics in the face of growing threats to humanity reveals the utilitarian basis for most ethical systems.

Religious Ethics

Many people derive their ethical beliefs from the religions to which they adhere. Most religions preach the rightness of selflessness, humility and devotion to a higher power. As in the case of business, fallible humans may conform to their own beliefs to varying degrees. While believers claim that the ethics of religion must be obeyed because they are decreed by God, others believe that religious ethics are a form of social control designed to deter antisocial behavior. It is easier to convince an individual to internalize a prohibition, and thus to become self-policing, when he can be convinced that the prohibition comes from God rather than from the state or from his neighbors.

References

• Online Ethics Center: Ethics Codes and Guidelines
• University of San Diego: Ethics Updates