Module 1: Basic Concepts

Module Overview
The basic concepts of ethics deal with the essential elements of ethics. The foundation of
morality has to be established before proceeding to different areas of Moral Experience: Agent,
Act, & Reason or Framework. The basic concepts are the preliminaries in our study of morality.

Motivation Question
Why do you need to study ethics? What are the key concepts in understanding ethics? How is
ethics relevant in your life?
Preliminaries in Ethics

Lesson Summary
This lesson tackles the main idea of ethics. It discusses the meaning and relevance of studying
ethics.

Learning Outcomes
1. You will be able to give the meaning of ethics.
2. You will be able to distinguish moral standard from non-moral standard.
3. You will appreciate the importance of understanding the moral dilemma.
4. You will be able to understand the significance of ethics in life.

Motivation Question
Do you think that this course is relevant to your degree program? Do you think that you can live
your life without asking the question what is the right thing to do?

Discussion
Philosophy and Ethics
Before you start understanding the meaning of ethics, you need to review what
philosophy is. You may have taken up the course: Introduction to Philosophy of the Human
Person, so you better remember those things that you learned from your senior high school
course. You may now say, “Oh, I should have studied well the course in my senior high school.”
Hence, for the sake of setting up your appropriate perspective in this course, let’s talk about the
basic concepts of philosophy.
Philosophy literally means “love of wisdom”. This kind of love is not the one that you feel
about your crush or your sweetheart, but this love is a kind of bond in which you cannot but be
always attached to it. It’s like your brother or sister or a family member, whether you personally
like him/her or not, you cannot deny that there is a bond between you, perhaps your DNA. This
bond will always tell you the truth that you cannot deny: you are siblings or you are family. In
philosophy, the constant searching for knowledge is what it means to love, attached to the true
knowledge, and always learning and progressing. Philosophy does not give up on truth because
truth will always be truth. If you have seen the statue in front of the administration building of
your dear university (Visayas State University), you can see the monument called “The Search
for Truth”. You always have to remember that because that is what philosophy means. You have
to look for the truth. There is no other way of finding the truth, but by studying, learning your
lessons whether from school, books, theories, experiences, people or all sources of knowledge.
Seek and you shall find. In the process of searching for truth, you become a wise person.
What is really the subject matter of philosophy? What does it study? Contrary to what
other people would say that philosophy is nothing but a way of twisting the truth, philosophy is
always aiming for the truth, for true knowledge. The subject matter of philosophy is all reality,
whether it is the reality of mathematics, the reality of history, the reality of fantasy like the
Anime, or the reality of your experiences. All things are being studied by philosophy, but
philosophy has also its focus; it has its object of the study. Philosophy looks at the reality and
concentrates more on the ultimate causes of the reality. What does an ultimate cause mean? It
means that philosophy is not only satisfied with what appears to you right now, but it digs
deeper and investigates further to achieve the final answer. That is why, in philosophy, it is
natural to ask questions to look for answers, especially the ultimate answer. Please take note
that we are not talking about being “pilosopo” in a Filipino way of understanding it, wherein you
are answering or asking questions just to make fun or pointing out irrelevant answer which is
more of an attitude that is not concerned with exposing the truth, but more on igniting quarrels
and conflicts.
Now, philosophy has its branches. Each branch focuses on its own set of questions,
different aspects of a reality. 1.) Metaphysics studies the being in itself, or the reality in itself; or
literally beyond nature. It asks the question “what is it?” “What is being?” 2.) Epistemology
studies the validity of knowledge. It asks the question “what do I know?” “Is what I know a true
knowledge?” “What is knowledge in itself?” 3.) Aesthetics studies art and beauty. It asks the
question “What makes a thing beautiful?” 4.) Ethics studies the morality of human act. It asks
the question “How should I live?” “What should I do?” 5.) Logic is an art and science of correct
thinking. It may ask the question “How is your answer correct?” but logic focuses more on the
process of answering the questions. If the rest of the branches ask more questions, logic is the
tool to answer the questions. Thus, in studying ethics, you need to exercise logic, making sure
that your way to getting the answer is correct, just like doing the experiment in your laboratory
courses where you really need to undergo certain scientific procedures to arrive at a certain
answer. Those branches above are not the only branches of philosophy. There are more other
branches of philosophy for you to find out.
Ethics, as you noticed above, is a branch of philosophy. The question of ethics is very
practical. You might have the same questions as well: “What should I do?” “How should I live my
life?” “Is this the right thing to do?” “Am I doing good?” Questions like those are attempting to
find the “good life” or “the happy life”. Aristotle would say that human beings are always
attracted to the “good”. Nobody is attracted to “evil” or “wrong”. Why? Even if you say that you
like bullying, cursing, or killing, you always see it as good for you. However, that is what Aristotle
called “apparent good”, good as it appears to you only, but most of the times the apparent good
is not good in itself. In this case, studying ethics allows you to discover how to identify what is
right or good, differentiating it from wrong or evil.
The Commission on Higher Education provides a definition of ethics in this course. It
states that “ethics deals with principles of ethical behavior in modern society at the level of the
person, society, and in interaction with the environment and other shared resources (CMO 20 s
2013).” Take note of the key words: principles, behavior and levels of interactions with others.
Here, ethics is primarily a set of principles; it is a system, a scientific investigation of what is
right and wrong. It also looks into the behavior. This behavior refers to how a person lives his
life; how you act on a situation. In other words, ethics is concerned with your character, the way
you live your life. Finally, ethics does not limit itself to your own private activity, but it also
involves the different levels of interaction, whether it’s person to person, within groups of people
or even with your environment including those non-living things. What’s the significance of
involving those you don’t care at all? At this point, you have to remember that your behavior or
your decisions or actions will always affect other people or even those stones, plants, etc. that
you don’t mind at all, whether directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally. Let’s talk
more about this on the next topic on freedom and responsibility.

The Relevance of Ethics

You may wonder why you have to take this course, Ethics. Usually, the question whether
you really have to take this course or not is something you may not be able to change at the
moment because this is part of your degree program. The tendency is that you will just take this
course for granted and just comply with the minimum standard. However, don’t bother yourself
asking why this course is mandatory for your degree program. You might end up still arguing
that you do not need this course. Besides, what you need at this time is to ask yourself if you
already know and understand the right course of actions that you need in order to have a happy
life. Do you already have the moral principles that guide you in your journey in life? If you believe
that you already have a set of moral standards, are you open and ready to face the different
moral standards that you might encounter along the way or will you just shut yourself and stick
to the uncertainties of your moral beliefs? Are you not willing to polish your moral principles and
improve your life with other people? Are you not bothered by the bad things happening around
you? If you believe that you have all the answers to all moral problems, then you are a perfect
person who needs nothing.
As a student, have you ever asked yourself if copying an assignment a form of cheating
and corruption? You may say that it’s fine because other people are doing it and that is normal
nowadays. However, if your instructor will automatically give you a failing grade because of
what you did, will you just say “thank you sir.”? Will you not ask why? How will you know that
your action is really bad? How will you know that your instructor’s course of action is right? You
will surely be able to answer concretely these questions if you allow yourself to learn from
ethics.
When you apply for work, even if you rank one in the application process but your
character or behavior is questionable, you will not find yourself on the list of hired applicants.
This only means that in workplace, work ethics or characters is also a crucial part in doing the
job. You may have the excellent skills, but without good character, your working life will do no
good to the company. If you have noticed, a lot of problems in the society are significantly about
ethical issues, such as corruption, unjust wage, tampering, killing the innocent people, rape,
abortion, stealing, infidelity with one’s partner, so on and so forth. These issues greatly affect
you as an individual and the society as a whole. Don’t you think that ethics has nothing to do
with this?
Now, you can always find the value of ethics in your day-to-day life. Simple way of living
still involves ethical life. You may still not be convinced how ethics is important, but it is up to
you how you will live your life without knowing what the right direction is. Nevertheless, you are
invited to continue to read, discover and learn as much as you can in order to choose the right
path and attain a happy and meaningful life.

The Moral Experience

A. The Elements of Moral Experience

Ethics deals primarily with the moral experience. A moral experience is what you
encounter in your life. There are three elements of the moral experience:
1. The Moral Agent. This element refers to the doer of a moral behavior and this
definitely includes you. This will be discussed in Module 2.
2. The Moral Act. This element refers to the activity of the moral agent. It shows the
behavior of the agent and/or it expresses the character of the agent. This will be discussed in
Module 3.
3. The Reason or Framework. This element answers the question why and how such
moral act is right or wrong. It captures the reasons of the moral agent for doing the moral act.
Module 4 provides various ethical frameworks.
When you do household chores, you actually possess a moral experience. You are the
moral agent, your act is doing the household chores, and you have your own reason why you
think doing the household chores is right. Moreover, when you tell a lie to your instructor about
your current situation, you still encounter a moral experience. You are the moral agent who is
lying, your act is the distortion of truth, and you may reason out that lying is morally good based
on a “Facebook meme.” Indeed, to say your certain act is right or wrong is easy, but letting you
explain what makes your act right or wrong (moral or immoral) is difficult. Judging your act with
reasonable justification is more difficult. That is why you better not judge a person without
studying the whole moral experience.
B. The Components of Human Act
Let us remember again that ethics is concerned with the morality of the human act. The
target of morality is the human act, not the act of human. Human act refers to your activity
which you perform knowingly, freely and willingly (Agapay, 1991).
1. Knowledge. A human act is performed consciously. You must be aware of your action,
such as doing household chores, helping the poor, lying to your instructors, plagiarizing, etc.
Unlike you, children under the age of reason, senile and mentally challenged are not capable of
acting knowingly.
2. Freedom. A human act is performed freely. You must perform an action with free
choice, with your own power, not by being forced by somebody or something else.
3. Voluntariness. A human act is performed willingly. Your action must come from your
own willfulness.
 Now, those three components must be present in order to be called a human act. The
lack of one of those elements leads to a defective and less voluntary. In other words, your
human act may still be at question and the moral evaluation of your action is uncertain.
Human act and act of man are two distinctive terms. The former is what you have just
learned above and the latter does not constitute knowledge, freedom and will. Act of human
refers to your actions that are not done deliberately. In other words, act of human is involuntary
or instinctive. Take for example: The beating of your heart, the fast beating of your heart when
you see your crush, the blinking of your eyes, walking, your sensation, digesting and so on. Thus,
acts of human are natural (physiological) activities that belong to a human and, therefore, they
are NOT the concern of morality.
When you look at your experience or any problem, you really have to see to it if the activity is a
human act. If you cannot identify the human act, then you will have a problem in assessing the
morality of the moral dilemma (this will be discussed in the next lesson). For instance, you
would say that you smell a bad odor from your seatmate. You cannot say that you have a moral
problem since being able to smell or the sense of smell is not a human act, rather it is an act of
human. However, if you say that you throw a “poop” at your seatmate, then throwing it is a
human act and you have a moral experience there. Furthermore, if a pet dog bites you, do you
think it performs a human act? Obviously no because a dog is not human! However, you have to
answer the following: Does the dog possess knowledge? Is it free? Does it bite voluntarily? If
one of your answers is no, then the act of the dog will never qualify as a human act. That is why
it is usually the owner/keeper of the dog who will be held responsible for the act of the dog and
it is he/she who will be questioned in terms of morality.