What Use Is Ethics?
What Use Is Ethics?
What Use Is Ethics?
In this subject, POLICE ETHICS AND VALUES, we will disclose and tackle the relationship between
ETHICS, VALUES and POLICING. The relation is often understood through a differentiation between abstract
notions of ethics and the moral conduct of police officers compared with the more practical focus of operational
policing. It includes the study on the general concepts and foundations of ethics and values with emphasis on the
Filipino Values. Discussions on the effects of ethics and values in the society particularly in the Philippine
National Police (PNP) are also included. It also gives emphasis on a humanity-oriented discipline intended to
develop an understanding of the norms appropriate action in public safety and their stand on the basic issues
including the legal and moral duties of public safety officers towards the community, based on Presidential
Decree No. 62. In addition, ethics and values are critically studied as applied to the present Law Enforcement
Code Ethics and Police Professional Conduct as embodied under Section 1, Rule II of the PNP Rules and
Regulations. Finally, the study of the development of Police Community Relation as well as the philosophies and
foundations of good Police community and human relations concludes this course.
WHAT IS ETHICS?
At its simplest, ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their lives.
Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral philosophy.
The term is derived from the Greek word ethos which can mean custom, habit, character or disposition.
Ethics covers the following dilemmas:
how to live a good life
our rights and responsibilities
the language of right and wrong
moral decisions - what is good and bad?
Our concepts of ethics have been derived from religions, philosophies and cultures. They infuse debates on topics like abortion, human
rights and professional conduct.
Approaches to ethics
Philosophers nowadays tend to divide ethical theories into three areas: metaethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.
Meta-ethics deals with the nature of moral judgement. It looks at the origins and meaning of ethical principles.
Normative ethics is concerned with the content of moral judgements and the criteria for what is right or wrong.
Applied ethics looks at controversial topics like war, animal rights and capital punishment
Moral realism
Moral realism is based on the idea that there are real objective moral facts or truths in the universe. Moral statements provide factual
information about those truths.
Subjectivism
Subjectivism teaches that moral judgments are nothing more than statements of a person's feelings or attitudes, and that ethical statements
do not contain factual truths about goodness or badness.
In more detail: subjectivists say that moral statements are statements about the feelings, attitudes and emotions that that particular person or
group has about a particular issue.
If a person says something is good or bad they are telling us about the positive or negative feelings that they have about that something.
So if someone says 'murder is wrong' they are telling us that they disapprove of murder.
These statements are true if the person does hold the appropriate attitude or have the appropriate feelings. They are false if the person
doesn't.
Emotivism
Emotivism is the view that moral claims are no more than expressions of approval or disapproval.
This sounds like subjectivism, but in emotivism a moral statement doesn't provide information about the speaker's feelings about the topic
but expresses those feelings.
When an emotivist says "murder is wrong" it's like saying "down with murder" or "murder, yecch!" or just saying "murder" while pulling a
horrified face, or making a thumbs-down gesture at the same time as saying "murder is wrong".
So when someone makes a moral judgement they show their feelings about something. Some theorists also suggest that in expressing a
feeling the person gives an instruction to others about how to act towards the subject matter.
Prescriptivism
Prescriptivists think that ethical statements are instructions or recommendations.
So if I say something is good, I'm recommending you to do it, and if I say something is bad, I'm telling you not to do it.
There is almost always a prescriptive element in any real-world ethical statement: any ethical statement can be reworked (with a bit of
effort) into a statement with an 'ought' in it. For example: "lying is wrong" can be rewritten as "people ought not to tell lies".
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Moral relativism
Moral relativists say that if you look at different cultures or different periods in history you'll find that they have different moral rules.
Therefore it makes sense to say that "good" refers to the things that a particular group of people approve of.
Moral relativists think that that's just fine, and dispute the idea that there are some objective and discoverable 'super-rules' that all cultures
ought to obey. They believe that relativism respects the diversity of human societies and responds to the different circumstances
surrounding human acts.
Why people disagree with moral relativism:
Many of us feel that moral rules have more to them than the general agreement of a group of people - that morality is more than a
super-charged form of etiquette
Many of us think we can be good without conforming to all the rules of society
Moral relativism has a problem with arguing against the majority view: if most people in a society agree with particular rules,
that's the end of the matter. Many of the improvements in the world have come about because people opposed the prevailing ethical
view - moral relativists are forced to regard such people as behaving "badly"
Any choice of social grouping as the foundation of ethics is bound to be arbitrary
Moral relativism doesn't provide any way to deal with moral differences between societies
Moral somewhere-in-between-ism
Most non-philosophers think that both of the above theories have some good points and think that
there are a few absolute ethical rules
but a lot of ethical rules depend on the culture