ethics, morality and law in the Philippine context

Ethical Principles

1. Ethics, Morality and the Law

2. The world is full of beliefs, claims rules and norms about how we should live and behave. Why is it important to understand all these?

3. Laws are formal rules that govern how we should behave as members of the society.

4. They specify what we must do and more often, what we should not do. Upheld and applied by the state and the court system. The goal is to instill basic and enforceable standard of behavior. Law has narrower focus than either morality and ethics. Laws can be just or unjust and subject to ethical assessment. There are matters where the law may be silent but morality and ethics may have a lot to say. (Example: when your friend cracks a racist joke. Ideas about what is good and right will guide us here.)

5. MORALITY An informal framework of values, principles, beliefs and customs and ways of living.

6. Usually not enforced by the state but there are often social pressures to conform to moral norms. Some people feel so strongly bound to certain moral codes that even to question the moral system would be considered wrong. Some examples of moralities are Christianity and Buddhism. Each of these provides an answer to basic ethical questions (How should I live and what should I do?) Many people inherit their morality from their family, community and culture. It’s rare for people to shop around for morality that closely fits their personal beliefs.

7. THE RISK OF AN UNEXAMINED LIFE - Socrates If we just accept a ready-made answer to the question of ‘How we should live?’ we might live our whole lives under a moral system which if we’d thought about it we would have rejected in part or in full.

8. Ethics is a branch of philosophy that aims to answer the basic question, ‘What should I do?’ It’s a process of reflection in which people’s decisions are shaped by their values, principles, and purpose rather than unthinking habits or social conventions. Our values, principles, and purpose are what give us a sense of what’s good, right, and meaningful in our lives. They serve as a reference point for all the possible courses of action we could choose. On this definition It can be tempting to see law, morality and ethics as more-or-less the same. We might think that so long as we’re fulfilling our legal or moral obligations we can consider ourselves ‘ethical’. In reality, there is more to ethics than morality and law.

9. Ethics requires us to think about issues the law can’t or doesn’t address. It puts moral systems under the microscope to see if they hold up. In an ideal world, our ethical beliefs shape the kinds of laws and moral systems a society develops. When our conscious, reflective, ethical views on what’s good and right change we ought to change the laws to reflect them. And likewise, our moralities should evolve in response to insights generated from ethical reflection. But we can only do this if we have a tool kit that keeps open questions to do with what is good and right. And that tool kit? That’s ethics.

10. Let us not judge people for the choices they make. We may not know the options they had to choose from. Daily Inspirational Quotes

11. Only trust someone who can see these three things in you: The sorrow behind your smile the love behind your anger The reason behind your silence

12. Stay positive. Work hard. Make it happen.