Tuesday,29th January 2013
We had a lecture regarding the Ethics Subject by Mr. Evangelos, He began the lecture with the Philosophy and Ethical thinking in Ancient Greece. He explained on the trading which taken place in Greece about 25 centuries ago which the Greek did the trading such as olive oil, wine and etc. They also settle with local people peacefully without war and they establish the city there. Besides, the Phoenician Colonies also stayed there with the different culture context but because of the awareness of differences they become so relativism in ethics which is good.
In addition, the lecture became more interesting when the topic of pleasure,love, justice and the good. Based on my understanding, in late 5th century, they were The Hippocratic Oath which is one of the famous Greek medical texts. This Oath, requires a new physician to swear upon a number of healing gods that he will upload a number of professional ethical standards. Besides, the doctors and the medical’s graduates of today also need to swear of Hippocratic. As an example, the doctors usually give a lot of medicine which is not require by ourselves and not even good to generate on our body.This shows that the Ethical issues among the doctors by taking advantages on medical bills. For more ethical issues, can be seen among the lawyers who lies most of the time in order to prevail or win in their cases. Besides, the engineers behavior also shows the bad ethical by using the low quality of materials such as steels,cements and sands in order to earn more profits.
Based on the discussion, the question on Is humanity Progress or Not? has been asked. In my point of view, the technological progress has been increase and improve all over the world. Instead of producing the latest gadgets and other goods, the weapon also has been produce as fast as the technological progress. Based on the research, this lead to ethical issues as well whenever people are killing each other even though there is no specific reason of doing so. The increasing in producing the weapons, may cause millions US Dollar which definitely wasting the money in order to kill innocent people. I do agree that the technological progress has been increase rapidly, but the value of humanity and respecting among the people has slowly disappeared.
The lecture had continued by the discussion about the disagreement through focusing attention on the logical inadequacy of identifying pleasure with the good between Callicles, an admirer of the Sophist Gorgias, is Socrates’ opponent. The dialogues or texts are more focusing on Socrates methods, who is persists on just saying Yes in order to stop the arguments. While in this context, Sophists talk about two to three lines which is more to manner.
For more further view of What is Ethics?
Ethics is the art and science of judging moral behaviors (good or bad) which have serious consequences (harming or rewarding) on human well being, society and environment. In the ethics concept, art can be classified as imaginative and creative, while science is the tools of reasons either Comprehensiveness, Coherence, Consistent or Adequate.
Due to ethics concept, Comprehensiveness is an issue whereas we need to consider of its consequences either it is harming or rewarding. In Coherence, it based on more logical methods where we need to take all of the factors and compile them in a formal setting. For the Consistent tools, the issues most probably will be contradicting and has the argumentation. The final tools of reasons is Adequate which is important while asking any questions especially in appropriate way of manner and the question it self. Therefore, ethics should have different meanings by judging of some human behaviors and not only about right or wrong, good or bad but based on moral philosophy behavior.
What is Ethics? (Reflective Diary Week 3)