Selfishness and Ethics

Kamal and Vimal were sisters. They married and had their children. Kamal lived with her husband in Hirabad. Vimal lived in Minabad. They had four brothers who also lived in another village called kattabad. Maruti was younger brother of these sisters. He had married and had children.

On a summer day, Maruti visited kamal’s home on an invitation, with his family and children. Paru was Maruti’s wife. Kamal’s daughter Mangal had married and had children. These children of similar age [of Maruti and Mangal] played happily in kamal’s home. Kamal’s husband Vinod was a factory worker and used to live in factory quarters. There were mango trees in her court yard of quarter house. Vinod purchased an old house in the village near his factory. He retired and shifted his family to this village house. He did not vacate the quarter house where he lived for many years. The mango trees had full of mangoes which kamal and her husband Vinod plucked and laid the mangoes in the quarter’s home for ripening. In the evening, Maruti went towards the quarter’s home with children for a walk. While he was going with children, kamal asked her brother not to go towards quarter home. He nodded, but the children insisted him to go towards quarters as they could play in the garden there. The little children explained Maruti of mangoes being laid in the quarter’s home for ripening. They returned to village home by sunset. All of them had their supper and went to their bed rooms. Vimal was also available in her sister’s home on that day as she too was invited for the function. Paru and vimal went into guest room where beds were arranged for them. They were chatting this and that before sleeping. Kamal and her daughter Mangal were in the kitchen for cleaning the kitchen articles before sleeping. But for a long time they did not return to bed room for sleeping. Vimal asked Paru to see what they are doing in the kitchen so long. Paru went into the kitchen and saw that kamal and her daughter were busy in eating ripe mangoes secretly. They had plenty of mangoes before them in a basket. They, seeing Paru entered kitchen, asked her to join them to eat mangoes, but she did not join them, saying she was in sleeping mood, and returned to the bed room and explained the story of what they were doing in the kitchen room secretly to Vimal. They [Paru and Vimal] chatted for a while and slept.

             Strange enough,   Kamal was not willing to share the mangoes with either children or the guests. Instead, she planned to enjoy eating mangoes with her daughter secretly. She was selfish. Though there were plenty of ripe mangoes, she did not offer the mangoes to either her brother or her sister or the children. She deliberately did this choice. This was her selfishness. Where the love had vanished? When guests were invited for a function of any kind, generally the guests were treated with honor. But she did it differently. To kamal, her brother, her sister, or the children were not important, but only her daughter [Mangal] was important. These are the relations now-a-days in close family.

Breech of moral values, and ethical behavior; leads to unhappiness among the groups of people. The relations get into separation and unhappiness.

Main Points of Aristotle's Ethical Philosophy

1.      The highest good and the end toward which all human activity is directed is happiness, which can be defined as continuous contemplation of eternal and universal truth.

2.      One attains happiness by a virtuous life and the development of reason and the faculty of theoretical wisdom. For this one requires sufficient external goods to ensure health, leisure, and the opportunity for virtuous action.

3.      Moral virtue is a relative mean between extremes of excess and deficiency, and in general the moral life is one of moderation in all things except virtue. No human appetite or desire is bad if it is controlled by reason according to a moral principle. Moral virtue is acquired by a combination of knowledge, habituation, and self-discipline.

4.      Virtuous acts require conscious choice and moral purpose or motivation. Man has personal moral responsibility for his actions.

5.      Moral virtue cannot be achieved abstractly — it requires moral action in a social environment. Ethics and politics are closely related, for politics is the science of creating a society in which men can live the good life and develop their full potential

            Morality

'Morality' is the normative moral code, or codes, of behavior acceptable/prohibited behavior within a particular group at a particular time.

 It is important to note that there are several different kinds of normative, or behavioral, codes that are recognized within communities and we need to distinguish them from one another, even though they are related.

 First of all, there is the law.  A legal code represents the minimum acceptable behavior of a particular group.  Members of a society who are unwilling to abide by the law are sanctioned by the community as a whole (though sanctions vary in severity based on the perceived harm to the community).

 Secondly, there is the moral code.  The moral code represents a much broader set of normative controls and is identifiable by the inverse proportion to the severity of the sanctions associated with the legal code.  That is, societies tend to be more tolerant of moral violations than of violations of the law.  We don't use economic sanctions or restrictions of liberty or life for those who act immorally. 

Thirdly, there is etiquette which represents the broadest possible set of behavioral expectations of a society.  Those who violate the etiquette codes suffer the least serious sanctions of all.  While one might insult a host or bring disgrace to Miss Manners, violations of politeness are not treated as harshly as either violations of the law or the moral code.  What each of these codes have in common is their attempt to control the behavior of individuals within society.  The distinction between each code seems to be located in the severity of the punishments associated with each kind of violation.

 In addition to the three normative codes noted above there is another type of social normative system:  religion.  Like law, morality and etiquette, religion is a normative system, i.e., it tells people how to behave.  Unlike the three systems mentioned above, it usually entails non-natural sanctions for violations of the code of conduct (i.e., reincarnation, heaven/hell, etc.).  

 One of the things that makes an analysis of morality difficult is the fact that these four different normative social systems overlap creating, in some cases, fuzzy boundaries.  For example, while failing to pay your taxes is clearly a violation of the legal code, it does not seem to be rude, immoral, or impious.  Murder, on the other hand, is not only a violation of the law, it is also generally considered to be impious, immoral, and rude!  Thus, when we are thinking about morality, we must be careful to keep our analysis focused on the sphere of morality to avoid conflations of religious and legal questions.  Attempting to draw the distinction between the legal and the moral, and to understand exactly what makes some social prescriptions part of the moral code as opposed to the legal or religious code, is in part, what some ethicists do.  Thus, we can think of an ethicist (i.e., someone who does Ethics) as a philosopher who investigates the nature of morality.  Ethicists are interested in the following kinds of questions:

 1. What are the grounds of morality (i.e., why do people think one action is right and another wrong, and yet another permissible but not obligatory),or the source of our moral intuitions?

 2. Can we give a systematic justification of our moral intuitions (i.e., which actions really are right, wrong and permissible, and how can we know that they are)?

 3. Are moral codes objective or relative (i.e., does right and wrong vary from place to place, time to time, or group to group)? and

 4. How does the language of morality work (i.e., what do words like 'right' and 'wrong' and 'permissible' mean?)?

 These four questions represent the foundation of ethical theory; they are the main problems ethicists try to resolve.