Moral Consciousness, Ethics, and Social Norms

Posted on Feb 21, 2025 in Philosophy and ethics

Moral Consciousness and Ethics in Society

Understanding Moral and Psychological Consciousness

  1. Moral consciousness and psychological consciousness: The moral problem arises from psychological consciousness. Choice stems from the awareness of who we are and what we do. The fundamental moral triplet is: consciousness, freedom, and responsibility.
  2. Moral conscience presupposes psychological consciousness. If a person’s acts were triggered by pressure from instincts or habits, if a person does not consciously acknowledge what they do, there would be no moral problem.
  3. Coercion can release the inner person from moral responsibility because, as pathological tendencies dominate, freedom is compromised.

Piaget’s Stages of Moral Development

  1. For Piaget, the main stages of formation of moral conscience are: anomie, heteronomy, socionomy, and autonomy.
  2. Socionomy presents an evolution towards heteronomy because this step starts the internalization of norms and values that had been imposed from outside.

Moral Values in Everyday Life

  1. Situations showing the presence (or absence) of moral values in everyday life:
    • Managing the state with honesty and justice.
    • Punishing the guilty.
    • Eradicating corruption.

Defining Morality

  1. Morality: is a set of rules, requirements, and values that govern the behavior of individuals in society.
  2. Normative: It is constituted by the norms or rules of action that set out a behavior that should be performed. Ex: Do not steal. Factual: It is constituted by the actions actually performed. Ex: A steal. The action taken will be moral or immoral as it agrees or disagrees with the established norm.
  3. Examples of moral action: to be fair with a friend, to be honest. Examples of immoral actions: cheating on a test, cheating at a game.
  4. Examples of “bending the rules” in everyday life: giving bribes to the traffic cop, using the friendships of someone in public court to get a document more quickly. From a moral point of view, this can cause the following consequences: disrespect and contempt for the law, opportunism, arrogance, the imperative of the stronger, demoralization of the idea of justice, distrust, and encouraging dishonest behavior.

Ethics and Bioethics

Understanding Ethics

  1. Ethics is a systematic analysis that investigates, analyzes, and explains moral behavior. Examples of jurisdictional questions of ethics: freedom, responsibility, and the source of morality.
  2. Ethics is important in the profession because being a good professional does not mean just acting with competence.

Bioethics

  1. Bioethics addresses ethical issues that arise from experiences of biomedical sciences and genetic engineering, such as organ transplants, artificial fertilization, and genetic manipulation.

Social Aspect of Morality

  1. The social aspect of morality is the set of norms and values accepted in a social milieu and with which the individual is faced since birth.
  2. The importance of internalization of norms is the fact that internalization is a personal reflection and consciously bending the rules and amounts received, which can be accepted or denied.
  3. The elements that influence the reaction of conscience before the standards are: information concerning the subject himself (personal training, character, temperament) and social factors and institutions (political system, cultural insights, media, and mass). These elements may create opportunities or impose obstacles to the realization of morality.
  4. A character interaction between social morality and personal conviction may lead to conflicts that arise whenever new values are opposed to old and traditional ones.

Moral Standard vs. Legal Standard

  1. Moral Standard: Coercion is internal, arising out of consciousness. In the legal standard, it is outside, carrying the state. The moral standard is met by the intimate conviction of individuals; about the rule of law, it is necessary that the individual agrees with it internally.
  2. Consequence of the statement: The main consequence is subjectivism and relativism, which will stimulate individualism, i.e., attitudes that consider personal interests above the individual. Rights are emphasized, while duties are forgotten or relegated to the background.
  3. The social function of morality is to ensure the functioning and stability of life in society and the possibility of improving it.