Historical Origins Of Ethics Essay

Appeal to the main stages of development of ethics is reasonable both due to importance of moral issues in the history of human culture and respect for the past, the desire to understand the essence of the moral and ethical issues at the level of current knowledge. The history of ethical ideas shows how the range of ethical issues was created, how their development changes and approaches to their solution, as understanding of the nature of morality gets deeper, as well as its purpose, and functions in life.
Ethics originates from ancient times in the epoch of establishing class society and the division of labor, separation of spiritual and theoretical work from the material and practical. Ethics as a kind of spiritual and theoretical activity gradually separated from the spontaneously formed moral conscience of the masses. It becomes a way of theoretical analysis of practical moral problems a person is facing in everyday life: "what is good and evil," "how to live and why," "what should be sought and what is it better to avoid," "what is the purpose of man and has does life have a meaning?" Practical questions of life are comprehended in ethics as the study of the nature of good and evil, the ideal and duty, principles and standards of human behavior, purpose and meaning of life.
Still, in order to convincingly find answers to these important regulatory issues, ethics seeks to understand the nature of morality and the human, the source and content of moral obligation, the nature of moral values. In other words, in order to teach people how to live and act, what to strive for and what to believe, ethics had to understand the origin and nature of morality, the nature of moral idealization, the laws of morality development, the ability of human to be the subject of morality, and others. To answer these questions, it was necessary to understand what the individual and society are, what does the world in which people live means, how it works, how it develops and how a person is aware of himself in this world.
In developed form ethics consists of a theoretical part - the doctrine of morality, its origin, nature and function, and practical - normative ethics that describes the goals and principles of human life. Beginning of the first ethical ideas belongs to a very early period of development of society and is associated with expansion of primitive society and emergence of class society. In those days people's perceptions of right and wrong, good and evil, happiness and misery, the meaning of life, death and immortality were originally embodied in the products of collective creativity - in myths and legends.
The first reflections of individual authors on the ethical issues that have come to us are from the Ancient East and belong to the III-II millennium BC. These reflections cover ancient views on the world, being a manifestation of religious and mythological worldview or doubt its correctness. The first ethical teachings and schools were organized in the Ancient East - India and China in I millennium B.C. The teachings of Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism had their own ethical problems, isolating them from the cosmological world view.
In the earlier views of the ancient East, pre-Socratic Greek ethical problems were still dissolved in cosmological views and natural philosophy. These views had typical characteristic of mythological consciousness interpretation of space by transferring to the structure of the universe of human characteristics and life views.
Therefore, in the historical and ethical process there can be distinguished the following main stages: the ethical teachings of the ancient East, ancient ethics, medieval ethics, the New Age and contemporary ethical theory.