Ethics is the science of the morality of human acts. It is a normative science because it concerns matters of values rather than of facts. Ethical values involve the concepts of goodness and badness of human acts or rightness and wrongness of conduct. Ethics is also theoretical because it speculates on the reason or cause why human acts and conduct are qualified to be good or right. It is also considered as practical because it is applied to the actual lives of people as a guiding principle for their decisions and actions. Since ethics deals with the conduct of mankind, there are three ethical standards in which a human being operates namely, personal, professional and scholarly. Personal refers to the principles of a person that make up his whole personality. These can be kindness, intelligence and righteousness; professional ethical standards refer to the ethical values applied on the workplace especially on the conduct and behavior of the employees. Companies are governed by sets of rules and conducts and these are strictly implemented in order to promote the well-being of every employee. A few rules that are common in the workplace is honesty, trustworthiness, perseverance, professionalism at all times and loyalty to the company.
On the other hand, as a student, the premise of scholarly ethical standards is quite similar to those of professionalism. In every work made by a student, honesty, professionalism and trustworthiness are the three common rules. For example, in professionalism, every student is required to submit their papers. The papers they had submitted reflect their own personal opinions and inner thoughts. Honesty means that the student solely made the paper without plagiarizing other’s work; trustworthiness is the ability to be trusted like performing sets of tasks given by their instructors. People follow the code of ethics simply because it is about the human acts and morality. Codes of ethics are made as a rule in order for the people to analyze whether their actions are right or wrong. There are many kinds of acts, but only human acts have ethical values. Human acts in accord with goodness are moral and this is prescribed and required by the code of ethics and needs to be followed by people.
Those who go against the code of ethics are labeled as immoral or people who perform wrong conduct. Based on the book, I certainly agree on the premise of Virtue ethics by the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle. In his theory, he asserts that the goodness of an act is determined by the person’s possession of moral characters or virtue, and its badness by the absence of these characters. For example, a student cheating on his exam is considered bad because it was a clear sign of dishonesty and not trustworthy. On the other perspective, a man who returned a lost bag to the rightful owner is considered an example of a good deed because he was being truthful and righteous. Furthermore, I strongly believed that the society as well as the students, businessmen and other people should follow the virtue ethics since all people must reflect on their inner self in order to judge whether their actions are right or wrong. People nowadays, lack the character and virtue that makes them truly human. All they do is to act according to what the environment dictates them to do, which leads to man losing his own self and credibility. Implementing these views should be through group discussion so that every employee must be educated about the proper conduct and behavior. Other methods such as talking and discussion amongst class and close friends are also effective because it will help students to get more familiarized with their actions as well as they will be able to reflect on themselves.
References
Popkin, R., & Stroll, A. (1993). Philosophy Made Simple (2nd ed.). New York: Double Day.
