Religion 35 - Why Be Ethical? (Ch. 1)
The Ethical Experience
Ethics is a part of what it means to be human. The four ways are:
The experience of personal response
 Your awareness of taking responsibility for another person based around taking
action before thinking. An automated response to an individual in times of need.
Hearing a plea for help stimulates an ethical response within you.
The experience of the “other”
 Ethics involving the imprint the “other” (simply another person) leaves with you
once you encounter that individual. Through their ‘face’ thoughts, emotions, and
responses are signaled within your consciousness creating an ethical response.
The experience of obligation
 The feeling of being obliged to follow rules or a law that has been outlined by
society or an authority figure (parents, teacher, or principal). One cannot remain
neutral toward an authority as the order/rule invades your thoughts and demands a
response, either positive or negative. This experience focuses around your duty or
obligation.
The experience of contrast
 Ethical experience surrounding a feeling of outrage toward something unfair or
unjust within society. These can range from abuse of women and children to the
suffering of others. We are given the ability to see how the world ought to look
and therefore this outcry for justice creates our ethical experience.
Ethics is defined as the “goodness” of life. The aim of ethics is to find the good in ours
and others lives.
Aristotle (384-322 BC): Teleological Ethics
As a young child, Aristotle started to form his ideas about how we come to know and
understand the world we live in. At age seventeen, he studied under Plato, Greece’s most
famous thinker, but both Plato and Aristotle had differing perspectives regarding
philosophy. Plato focused on the abstraction and world of ideas whereas Aristotle
focused around the natural world and the human experience. After the death of Plato,
Aristotle establishes his own school, Lyceum, in Athens.
Teleological Ethics
Aristotle’s teleological ethics surrounds four major ideas; the pursuit of happiness,
teleology, human excellence and the mean.

The Pursuit of Happiness - Aristotle’s first concern was not about the individual
but of the society as a whole. He believed that an individual is shaped by the
community for which the person resides and that through the community that
person will find happiness. Happiness, as defined by Aristotle, is a condition of
the good person who succeeds in living well and acting well.
Aristotle believed that ethics is about discovering what is good for us humans,
what allows us to reach our full potential, what our internal compass is, and what
we are intended to be.

Teleology - Aristotle believed that our greatest ability as humans was to use our
intelligence to be rational (by following our internal compass we develop this
ability). We humans need to use our ability to reason to make our choices.
Therefore Aristotle believed that when we act ethically we use our capacity to
reason as we develop our good character and that through this we reach our
highest from of happiness.

Human Excellence - Aristotle believed that when people seek to become who they
intend to be, we develop positive habits (called excellence virtues). To act
virtuously we must use reasoning to guide our action and that through constantly
using reasoning to guide our actions we reach human excellence.

The Mean - Aristotle’s believed that moderation in all that we as individuals do is
central to ethics. He called for a need to avoid excess and stay in the middle, a
middle that suits the individual.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Deontological Ethics
Kant was born into a strict and poor household. His life was regimented and he never left
far from his birthplace. Kant began his work at the university level by becoming a tutor to
students and eventually he was hired as a professor at the age of forty-six.
Theoretical Reason
One of Kant’s primary concerns was classifying how humans come to know things. This
focused around how the laws of nature and cause and effect influence human behavior.
Theoretical reasoning looks at what people actually do.
Practical Reason
Kant believed that to truly understand how human make choices we must look at the
moral dimension of behavior, that is why human act out of not the laws of nature but
choices based on principles. Practical reasoning look at what people should do.
These two areas of reason form Kant’s perspective that our “moral duty” helps our
understanding of ethics.
Kant’s Ethics
Kant believed that our goal in life is to attain what is good. Kant suggested that ethics
provides humans with the idea of practical certainty (interests that cannot be proved
through experience or evidence). The three areas of interest include: God, freedom, and
immortality to attain the supreme “good”

God – God exists because humans cannot achieve the supreme “good” on their
own power as there are too many circumstances out of our control.

Freedom – To achieve the supreme “good” we must do something if we are able
to do it, this is our duty as humans who are free by nature.

Immorality – We are unable to fully achieve the supreme “good” simply in our
earthly lives that is where there is a life beyond in which we can achieve it.
Kant’s perspective on ethics focuses around an individual. Our ethics is discovered in our
private life and our autonomy (independence). Kant ideas surround our desire to do our
duty toward society and others, deontological ethics (from the Greek word deon for
‘duty’). The concept of duty is an idea that you do something because we feel we have to
even though we may be busy or hoping to do other things. Duty is determined by the
objective principles according to which we act, that is every rational person would act in
the same way if they had to ability to do so.
Kant also proposed that we look at people as individuals (end), not means. He proposed
that society must look at a person as a human being, not a method of acquiring money or
gaining a service.
Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995): An Ethics of Face
Originally born in Lithuania to a Jewish family, Levinas focused his attention on the
contrast between Western philosophy and his own Jewish faith. He was horrified by the
Holocaust as he was captured and had his family killed by the Nazi horrors.
Levinas’ ethics focused around the search for the “Good”, he attempted to go further than
looking at simply at the “Being” (seeks to name what is in common when you take away
the consequences). He believed that the concept of ‘Being’ overlooks the uniqueness of
each thought, act, and person. He further thought that these unique thoughts, actions, and
persons are traces of the ‘Good’, or God. We see glimpses of God but there is always
something more. With this concept in mind, Levinas suggested that every time we see
another’s face we are seeing an imprint of God, God’s handy-work. Each time we
encounter another face, we encounter the “Other” (simply another person). That
encounter calls us to respond in a manner that is welcoming, viewing them as a superior
not inferior. The face is how God touches us without us knowing. It calls us to be
responsible, to be aware that we are not innocent as we many think we are and that we
are to be responsible to the “Other” providing care and concern for the people within our
society.