Ethics, Morality, and Human Behavior in Society
Ethics and Morality
Since human beings are grouped into societies, they need to develop a set of rules to regulate their behavior with other members of the community.
Moral or morality comes from the Latin “mor, moris,” meaning “usual.” It can be defined as the set of rules or standards by which our behavior is governed, or the behavior of a human being is ruled.
Morality can also be defined as what people must do to maintain social stability.
Ethics illustrates our moral behavior, about the problems that emerge in our everyday life.
Ethics is part of a broader discipline called philosophy. Philosophy means love or attraction to knowledge and emerged in Ancient Greece in the 6th century, when some thinkers left the mythical explanations about the origin of the world to provide national reasons for all those questions.
Ethics is derived from the Greek word “ethos,” translated as “inner attitude on character.” It would be the foundation of acting and the birthplace of human acts. That character is acquired from childhood and is the result of habits.
All in all, ethics is a discipline derived from philosophy that studies the moral obligations of humans and the moral behavior of man in society.
Man is a moral being because nonhumans only have instinctual needs. Animals usually act by instinctive mechanisms. They are not free to choose how to act. So, ethics is interested in human actions because they are inspired by values that say what is right or wrong. Humans are free beings, so all their actions can be categorized as right or wrong from a moral point of view.
Knowledge That Guides Our Moral Life
Humans are born disoriented and must learn to live. So, there are some skills that guide us on the path to follow:
- Politics: It is a part of morality. It involves that a free society, formed by free people, solves problems created by them. Politics leads us to the common good and helps us in the social and public sphere to find justice.
- Law: It is the set of rules that human beings have created in society, inspired by the concept of justice. Laws establish the rules which govern social coexistence and resolve disputes between individuals.
- Morality: It helps us in our development as individuals, proposing ideas for a right life. From this, we develop guidelines for conducting our lives.
- Religion: Most religions offer immortality aspirations after life. They also give way to get happiness and comfort people in hard times related to death and pain.
Freedom as a Condition of Morality
It can be understood as the ability to make decisions without external impossibilities.
Freedom can be used in different ways, which are summarized in this classification:
- Legal freedom: It belongs to the field of law. You can do whatever you want, but the limits are set by laws. An example is the constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion, movement, residence, etc.
- Leeway (libertad de acción): It consists of doing what you want and taking the consequences.
- Individual freedom: Society recognizes that human beings are born free, and they have intelligence and will. An example is freedom of thought.
The Morality of Immanuel Kant
Lying is bad, but… always? Would you betray any thief in court who is my best friend who stole to feed their children? The philosopher Immanuel Kant affirmed that we have freedom and morality, and there are different uses of reason.
- Theoretical reason (razón teorética): It is responsible for knowing how things are in the physical world.
- Practical reason (razón práctica): It analyzes how we should act, which are the principles of human behavior, and which kind of rules guide our behavior.
In moral actions, we must distinguish what a person does and what a person wants to do. So, only the human can be judged as good or bad, but not his act.
For these cases, Kant talks about “categorical imperatives.” It means we have to act as if we want our actions to become a universal law. This is to say that we must act in the way we want to be treated by people.