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What are values? Values are the field of ethics, also called moral
philosophy, which involves systematizing, defending, and recommending
concepts of right and wrong behavior. Philosophers today usually divide
ethical theories into three general subject areas: metaethics, normative
ethics, and applied ethics. Metaethics investigates where our ethical
principles come from, and what they mean. Are they merely social
inventions? Do they involve more than expressions of our individual
emotions? Metaethical answers to these questions focus on the issues of
universal truths, the will of God, the role of reason in ethical judgments,
and the meaning of ethical terms themselves. Normative ethics takes on a
more practical task, which is to arrive at moral standards that regulate
right and wrong conduct. This may involve articulating the good habits that
we should acquire, the duties that we should follow, or the consequences of
our behavior on others. Finally, applied ethics involves examining specific
controversial issues, such as abortion, infanticide, animal rights,
environmental concerns, homosexuality, capital punishment, or nuclear war.
By using the conceptual tools of metaethics and normative ethics,
discussions in applied ethics try to resolve these controversial issues.
The lines of distinction between metaethics, normative ethics, and applied
ethics are often blurry. For example, the issue of abortion is an applied
ethical topic since it involves a specific type of controversial behavior.
But it also depends on more general normative principles, such as the right
of self-rule and the right to life, which are litmus tests for determining
the morality of that procedure. The issue also rests on metaethical issues
such as, "where do rights come from?" and what kind of "beings have
rights?" Aristotle conceives of ethical theory as a field distinct from the
theoretical sciences. The principal idea with which Aristotle begins is
that there are differences of opinion about what is best for human beings,
and that to profit from ethical inquiry we must resolve this disagreement.
He insists that ethics is not a theoretical discipline: we are asking what
the good for human beings is not simply because we want to have knowledge,
but because we will be better able to achieve our good if we develop a
fuller understanding of what it is to flourish. In raising this question,
what is the good?
Ethics in ancient times signified moral philosophy (philosophia moral
is) generally, which was also called the doctrine of duties. Subsequently
it was found advisable to confine this name to a part of moral philosophy,
namely, to the doctrine of duties which are not subject to external laws
(for which in German the name Tugendlehre was found suitable). Thus the
system of general deontology is divided into that of jurisprudence
(jurisprudentia), which is capable of external laws, and of ethics, which
is not thus capable, and we may let this division stand.
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