Module 1

ETHICS, MORES, AND VALUES

1.0 The Realm of Morality: Ethics and Mores

ETHICS – branch of philosophy that deals with the systematic questioning and critical examination of the
underlying principles of morality

- came from the root word ‘ethos’ which refers to the character of a culture

ETHOS – includes the attitude of approval or disapproval in a particular culture at a given time and place

MORALITY – subject matter being studied in ethics

- came from the root word ‘mores’, which refers to the customs, including the customary
behavior, of a particular group of people
- This constitutes the core of the attitudes and beliefs of a particular group of people

• MORES (in Latin) and ETHOS (in Greek), both refer to customary behavior.

ETHICS – the study of moral goodness or badness or the rightness and wrongness of an act

Two approaches of Ethics:

1. Normative ethics
2. Meta-ethics

NORMATIVE Ethics – answers the question, ‘What is good?’

- pertains to norms or standards of goodness and the rightness or wrongness of an act

- A COMPREHENSIVE NORMATIVE ETHICAL SYSTEM tries to give a moral framework where
its standards of morality are based

META-ETHICS – examines the presuppositions, meanings, and justifications of ethical concepts and
principles

- instead of assuming that there is an objective moral truth, meta-ethics will question the
basis for this by asking whether or not morality is objective or subjective, or by posing
questions about the assumption of a moral theory such as ‘What is your justification for
claiming in your theory that pleasure is good?

THE STUDY OF ETHICS AND MORALITY – entails an analysis of both the individual human person acting
as a free moral agent and his/her society with its social rules and sanctions that set limitations on
individual behavior

INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR – governed by a sense of what is the right thing to do, which is based on the
CUSTOMS or MORES of a particular society

- the way parents raise their children is governed by the mores of their society.
1.1 The Role of Society and the Individual in the Emergence of Mores

WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER – well known sociologist and anthropologist

- claims that our notion of what is ‘right’ stems from our basic instinct to survive

• human beings formed groups in order to meet the task of survival, and from living in groups they
observed best practices and developed the most practical way of doing things. From these practices
emerged traditions and notions of the right thing to do

- for each group of people there is a right way of catching game, a right way of treating
guests, and a right way of dressing up. Sumner refers to these notions of ‘right’ and ‘true’ as
‘FOLKWAYS’.
- MORES come from folkways, with the added element of societal welfare embodied in them

• In order to preserve society and its accepted norms and practices, the individual, consciously or
unconsciously, defends and upholds society’s notions of what is right.

SOCIAL RULES AND SANCTIONS – may be implicit or explicit, in order to preserve the group practices
and to control the behavior of the individual for the purpose of maintaining order in society.

CUSTOMS – emerge out of repeated practices

HABITS – emerge from the individual observance of group practices

MORES – become the compelling reason to do what ought to be done, because it is the right thing to do
to preserve and protect society

- exert social pressure on the individual to conform to society’s expectations in terms of

character and behavior — that is, to come as close as possible to the ideal man or woman.

with regard to morality one always has to consider two points of view

1. THE POINT OF VIEW OF SOCIETY, together with its customs, social rules, and social sanctions,
2. THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL or the free moral agent who develops habits in the
course of following the social norms established by society

MORAL AGENCY is an individual's ability to make moral judgments based on some notion of
right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions.
A MORAL AGENT is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong.
NOTION OF MORALITY – develops with the interplay between society and the individual

SOCIETY – composed of different groups that directly or indirectly shape the values of the individual

INDIVIDUAL – is assumed to be a free moral agent who can make choices and deliberate or reflect
before acting or making a decision

SOCIETY – functions as a way of controlling the behaviour of an individual

- impose social controls and sanctions so that the individual would be guided accordingly
- coerces its members to follow its rules to maintain order
MORES – become the basis of the morals of that society when expressed or laid out as ethical principles
that its members are bound to respect and follow

- embodiment of societal welfare, laws and institutions emerge in order to protect society
and to set some system of societal control over the behavior of individual members
- These laws could be positive laws and customary or common laws, while INSTITUTIONS
could be crescive or enacted.

• According to Sumner, as society grows, it becomes more difficult to control the behavior of its
members, and there is a need to formalize and codify some of the rules that we are bound to follow.

• Sumner states that COMMON LAWS OR CUSTOMARY LAWS are part of the customs of our society,
and they emerge unconsciously as part of the mores of our culture, whereas POSITIVE LAWS are
formulated and are products of rational reflection, discussion, and verification

CRESCIVE INSTITUTIONS – products of our mores like our very rich religious practices which mirror the
religiosity of Filipinos

ENACTED INSTITUTIONS – products of rational reflection and are purposely established to cater to the
needs of the members of society, in the process establishing order and protecting society

- Examples of enacted institutions are our banking system and land titling system.

1.2 Freedom and Morality

John Paul Sartre – existentialist philosopher

- assumes the idea of radical freedom by claiming that “man is condemned to be free”
- conceives of “man” as an unconstrained free moral agent in the sense that he always has a
choice in every aspect of his life
- “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.” “Man” is never compelled or
determined; he is totally free and therefore, totally responsible for all the things that he
does.

MORES – serve as a form of social control to limit, govern, or regulate your behavior in order to
maintain order in your society

Freedom of the human person in the moral sense of the word – assumes that one is a free moral agent.

MORAL – refers to the freedom to make one's choice in accordance with one’s own moral discernment
of what is good and bad, and one is taking full responsibility for one’s own actions and is using his/her
rational and empathetic capacity as a moral being

1.3 Necessary Conditions for Morality: Freedom and Obligation

JOHN MOTHERSHEAD – there are two necessary conditions for morality to occur: FREEDOM and
OBLIGATION

FREEDOM – assumed when one is making choices and is the agent taking full responsibility for planning
his/her life, and in the process, planning and budgeting his/her actions for some future goal
• Animals do not have the capacity to look forward and consciously plan for the future. Even when ants
hoard their food for the rainy days, this action is based on instinct. Only human beings are capable of
planning for their future, planning their life, and setting their goals as a result of these plans.

OBLIGATION – one’s duty to him/herself to exercise freedom as a rational moral being

- his/her duty to him/herself to do this budgeting and planning for the future because the
future is yet to be and the only way to make it better is by being obliged to do so.

• In other words, you are not free to be unfree. In making moral decisions and choices, it is within the
capacity of the human person as an active and free moral agent to exercise his/ her freedom of choice
as his/her obligation to him/herself.

“Buntot mo, hila mo!” – is taking full responsibility for your actions and being obliged to do so.

2.0 Values and Choices

2.1 Only humans are moral

JOHN MOTHERSHEAD – CONDUCT refers to deliberate human action.

- a result of the process of reflection based on the idea that the human person is endowed
with the capacity to think and plan his/her own life using his/her rationality and to weigh
the consequences of his/her actions

• Animal behavior is instinctive whereas human behavior is a matter of conduct

• While some animals have been recognized to have the ability to solve simple problems and the ability
to connect events like cause and effect, they develop these through the process of CONDITIONING,
where positive and negative reinforcement are used for the animal to learn the behavior.

PRE-REFLECTIVE MORALITY – this is morality that occurs prior to deliberation and reflection

- because animals are not capable of the wide range of deliberation, reflection, concept
construction, and rational and critical thinking that humans are able to do

JOHN MOTHERSHEAD – only humans are moral in so far as they are capable of deliberate human action

2.2 Value Experience: Values and Moral Values

VALUE EXPERIENCE – the side-taking part of our experience

- happens when we make choices and indicate our preferences, for example, when we like or
dislike, approve or disapprove, favor or disfavor

VALUES – result of this process of value experience where you set which priorities to pursue

- may also be considered as imperatives that you have set your mind to do

JOHN MOTHERSHEAD – “All values are priorities with respect to some aspect of human experience. This
is usually expressed by saying that values are imperatives; they make a claim upon us, whether we admit
the claim or not.”

VALUATION PROCESS – when we set priorities among the choices or alternatives available to us
• Mothershead argues that a value can become a MORAL VALUE if it becomes an unlimited priority in
its scope of relevance in our life. This is to say that one is willing to give up other values in order to
promote what s/he considers as a moral value.

moral value – takes precedence and priority over other values

2.3 Moral Judgments and Moral Decisions

JOHN MOTHERSHEAD – “Making moral judgments is budgeting actions”

- “[a] moral decision is the most important class of moral judgments” because it “has
reference to the judger’s own future action.”
- “not all moral judgments are decisions”
- “many of our MORAL JUDGMENTS have reference to other people or groups of people.”

MORAL DECISIONS – reflect our choices as to what should be included or excluded in our life.

MORAL JUDGEMENT is the main cognitive factor in moral consciousness. It involves intuition
of moral standard by reason and comparison of a voluntary action with it. It also involves
evaluation of voluntary action of it as right and wrong.
2.4 Intellectual Choice and Practical Choice

INTELLECTUAL CHOICE – process of giving normative answers as rational moral beings

- “What do I ought to do given this situation?”

NORMATIVE ANSWERS – answers about what we ought to do from a moral system that we uphold and
its moral principles

- These NORMATIVE OR PRESCRIPTIVE ANSWERS would also take into consideration the
behavior that is expected of us by society.

PRACTICAL CHOICE – “What would I be inclined to do, given this situation”

• These practical choices when confronted with the actual situation have to do more with the
psychological aspect of the person actually embroiled in the moral situation or dilemma, according to
Grassian. He adds that “[o]ur quest, however, is not the psychological one of what an individual would
as a matter of fact be inclined to do in a given situation but, rather, the normative one of what he
morally ought to do. The mere fact that an individual might be inclined to act in a particular way does
not show that that is the way he should act.”

CONCLUSION

MORES – come from our folkways which are the source of our notion of what is right, but with the
added element of societal welfare in order to protect, preserve and maintain society

MORALITY – the subject matter of ethics

two points of view to consider:

1. THE POINT OF VIEW OF SOCIETY – together with its customs, social rules and sanctions
2. POINT OF VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL or the human being as a free moral agent.
• According to Mothershead, there are two necessary conditions for morality to occur: freedom and
obligation.

Freedom – assumed when one is making his/her choices and is the agent who is taking full responsibility
for planning his/her life, and in the process, planning and budgeting his/her actions for some future
outlook or goal. This is in accordance with his/her moral and rational capacity for knowing and
discerning what is right and wrong. Together with the assumption of freedom is obligation

OBLIGATION – construed as one’s duty to oneself to exercise this freedom as a rational moral being

- a person’s duty to him/ herself to do this budgeting and planning for the future.

VALUE EXPERIENCE – the side-taking part of our experience

- happens when we make choices and indicate our preferences, for example when we like or
dislike, approve or disapprove, favor or disfavor

VALUES – the result of this process of value experience where you set which priorities to pursue

- may also be considered as imperatives that you have set your mind to do

• Mothershead argues that a value can become a moral value if it becomes an unlimited priority in its
scope of relevance in one’s life.

MORAL JUDGMENT – has reference to other people or groups of people, specifically with regard to
what they should or ought to do.