What do we mean by ethics?
The word ethics comes from the Greek meaning a source custom or habit. ethical philosophy involves the study of law and evil. Sometimes people use the word morality instead of ethics. Morality and ethics are to find how we should live. Ethics is a major branch of philosophy. (Other branches: metaphysics and epistemology of knowledge, or the essential nature of things and the logic or reason.
Approaches to ethics
There are four possible approaches to ethics.
Descriptive ethics: involves the description of the way things are or customs of a society.
Normative ethics: it is to make moral decisions or decide what is right and what is false. There are two main ways to do this, namely by intentions or moral rules (deontological ethics) or result (teleological).
Meta-ethics, analysis of this approach to the nature of ethics. It includes both realism and anti-realism. Realism is the view that moral values can be discovered, possibly using intuition. Antirealism believes that morality is determined by the peoples thoughts and feelings
Applied ethics: thus the ethical values can be used in specific circumstances. For example, the study of abortion involve a legal person applying the theory to the situation of abortion. To do this, they can take on both normative values of these meta-ethics. Normative ethics More Details
Teleological Theory
teleological theory is also known as consequentialism and implies results. An example of the teleological theory is utilitarianism. According to this theory, we should do what creates the most happiness for the greatest number of people. However utilitarians are divided on what happiness is. Some argue that happiness is simply fun, but others claim it is to minimize the pain. Two main representatives of utilitarianism are Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
Jeremy Bentham product calculation felicific or hedonic calculus. For Bentham could calculate the actual amount of pleasure over pain through a kind of mathematical method. The calculation is to take into account factors such as intensity, duration and certainty of pleasure.
John Stuart Mill divided fun in the superior and inferior order, claiming cultural, spiritual and intellectual pleasures of being a higher order in nature.
Some argue that the legislature should apply the utilitarian principle of happiness to formulate general rules for society. These utilities are called utilitarian rule. On the other hand, act utilitarians claim that we should apply the principle of happiness and every act and determine the morality of each individual situation.