What is the Pedagogy of Ethics?
[Relevant for Public Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude]
What is the Pedagogy of Ethics?
The Constant and Variability of Ethics
While spelling out the importance of ethics insofar as it affects human conduct and behavior in the society, in this blog-section I seek to respond to some of the important challenges to ethics as a philosophical discipline, particularly from certain approaches to make ethics itself relative. For writing this text, I got contextual support from IGNOU MA Philosophy content.
Introduction
Ethics in the philosophical treatise which studies human behavior and tries to determine what is right or wrong behavior. It is also called moral philosophy from the Greek ethos and the Latin Morse which means customs, way of behavior, human character.
That there is in man a spontaneous awareness of a distinction between right and wrong behavior is an indubitable fact. But philosophy here likes elsewhere cannot content itself with simply registering facts. It tries to reflect on the meaningfulness of such facts, establish them or reject them on a rational basis, understand their implication, draw their practical consequences and above all intuit their ultimate cause if any.
Our study of ethics is also conditioned by some philosophical assumptions, which we take to be philosophically established in other treatises.
Perhaps the three principal ones are the possibility of meta-empirical knowledge, the ontological structure of reality and man as a rational and free being, philosophically established in critical ontology and psychology, respectively.
For us, therefore, ethics is an attempt not only to understand what is and what is not right human behavior, the empirical and meta-empirical ground, if any, of the distinction between right and wrong behavior, but also to see whether the conclusion thus drawn can serve as objective norms for practical conduct.
The importance of ethics is obvious. From as far back in history as we can tell, man has always sought to know how to lead a good life and to draw up rules of conduct. Thinkers of all cultures tried to explain in what this good life considered, and especially why precisely it was good. It is not so much that traditional moral values are questioned, i.e. the just war inviolability of life in cases of the hopelessly suffering and of unwanted pregnancies, sexual intercourse only between the legally married, indissolubility of marriage, etc., but more radically still that the very meaningfulness of an unchanging and universally valid morality is brought into question.
The causes of this modern questioning are hard to pin down.
Certainly, the spread of education advances in science and technology, problems arising from modern ways of living like the ever-increasing urbanization, easier communication, media, faster means of travel are some of the causes.
But if, as we have already implied, moral thinking is intimately linked with philosophical thinking in general, it might very well be that these causes, whatever they might be, are to be sought for a deeper human level. Human person perhaps is not so much asking about the morality of this or that human act, but more deeply still about himself, the meaning of his life, the directions of human history, the significance of the human world he lives in, the ambit of his knowledge and the possibility of his ever getting an answer to the question he asks.
Ethics, of course, cannot dream of suggesting answers to such radical questions, but it might well prove to be a way of approach to questions.
The Constant And The Variable In Morality
Whether or not man has evolved from subhuman beings, it is not for us to decide. But we can easily accept the theory that this human consciousness itself has natured and developed.
At the beginning, human person was not necessarily conscious of himself or herself as human as we today are. On an individual level, this progress in human consciousness is a fact of experience. The child is a human being but as it grows it becomes more and more conscious of itself. Human consciousness involves one’s consciousness of oneself as an individual and as a social being.
Moral consciousness is an integral part of human consciousness.
Primitive human, to call him so, must have been morally conscious otherwise we are not entitled to call him or her human at all. So, if moral consciousness belongs essentially to human consciousness as such and in a univocal and not in an analogical sense, it has been a kind of constant in all the later stages of man’s evolution.
If we speak of moral consciousness at all, whether of the primitive human or ours, we must speak of it in terms of the immediate data of consciousness as foundation on the human order more precisely on human interrelatedness and these data to be in conformity to human reasons and to be conducive to the self-realization of human person as human. But human moral consciousness has been evolving. This change takes different forms, some of which are easily understandable and afford no real problems to ethics, some are not so easily understandable and therefore afford some difficulty. This clearer self-consciousness is obviously concretized and particularized in specific moral precepts. Even at one given stage of human moral consciousness, different people living in different human situations, situations affecting their interrelatedness will live a more or less different moral life. Such human situations can arise out of geographical, climatic and economic conditions. Again, social moral consciousness has been in effect, intimately related, linked to conditions by religious consciousness, different religious beliefs have produced different moral values.
The history of religion affords us with many examples, human sacrifice, burning of witches, Saturnalia, etc. This change is primarily undirected in religious consciousness and only secondarily indirectly in moral consciousness. It is a change in the religiously conditioned morality.
However, a change in civil law governing the mores of people does not necessarily mean a change in morality. When a civil law declares that something is legal, it does not mean to say that it is moral. The variable in morality raises the important question regarding the kind of certitude we can have in moral matters.
To put it bluntly, if what is believed to be morally right today can be proved to be morally wrong tomorrow and vice versa, can one be absolutely certain of what is morally right or morally wrong?
At the very outset, we have to distinguish carefully between moral relativity and ethical relativism. Moral relativity is simply the view that different people, especially in different civilizations and cultures, have or have had different moral beliefs. This is an undeniable empirical fact. But ethical relativism is the philosophical theory that no foundation exists. There is no universal moral norms or basic moral principles. And what is morally right is related to the individual or group of men in question. If such a theory can give reason for such a position as Sartre does, it is ethical relativism in the strict sense. If it cannot give reasons but simply admits that it is strictly impossible to say what is morally right and morally wrong, it can be reasonably called ethical skepticism.
In an evolutionary view of human being i.e. on the accepted theory that human consciousness of himself or herself is increasingly developing, can we pretend to say that the last word on what human person is? Obviously not. However, an attentive study of the evolution of human person’s self-consciousness and of moral knowledge helps one discover a certain constant progression.
Bibliography & Courtesy: IGNOU MA Philosophy Text
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