What kind of science is ethics?

Ethics is an ancient human science. Ethics is also called "moral philosophy" and is an important branch of philosophy. It not only explores specific moral norms and methods and approaches to implement moral norms, but also Study the inevitability and possibility of human morality from the universality of philosophical epistemology. Ethics always has two states of existence, one is the ethics grasped by speculation in people's concepts, and the other is the ethics that exists in real social life, such as ethical relationships, ethical phenomena, ethical life, etc. Ethical phenomena are always integrated with other social phenomena and cannot be separated. Ethics, like law and politics, is an abstraction made by the subject in subjective thinking from the perspective of cultural attributes and cultural functions. Compared with the three major areas of truth, goodness, and beauty formed by historical accumulation in human social life, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have become the three basic forms of human spiritual culture.

Ethics

ethics

The science of morality. Also known as ethics and moral philosophy. In the West, the word ethics comes from the Greek word ετησs, which means customs, habits, character, etc. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first to give it the meaning of ethics and virtue, and his book "Nicomachean Ethics" is the earliest ethics treatise in the West. The term ethics was not used in ancient China, and it was only widely used in the 19th century.

Ethics takes moral phenomena as its research object, including not only the phenomenon of moral consciousness (such as personal moral emotions, etc.), but also the phenomenon of moral activities (such as moral behavior, etc.) and the phenomenon of moral norms. Ethics distinguishes moral phenomena from human activities, explores the nature, origin and development of morality, the relationship between moral levels and material living standards, the highest principles of morality and standards of moral evaluation, moral norm systems, and moral education and cultivation, the meaning of life, human value and attitude towards life and other issues. The most important among them is the relationship between morality, economic interests and material life, and the relationship between personal interests and overall interests. Different answers to these questions have formed different and even opposing ethical schools. Marxist ethics studies morality as a social and historical phenomenon, focusing on universal and fundamental issues in moral phenomena, and reveals the laws of moral development. Marxist ethics is based on historical materialism and emphasizes the class nature of morality in class society and the significance of moral practice in ethical theory.

Ethics and philosophy are closely related. Philosophy is the theoretical basis of ethics, and people's world outlook and historical outlook have a direct impact on people's moral practice. At the same time, disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, psychology, sociology, and education also influence and penetrate each other. With the development of social politics, economy, culture and science and technology, the theory of ethics is gradually improving through differentiation and synthesis, opposition and integration, and its research field is also constantly expanding. As China's reform and opening up continues to deepen, the social value of ethics will continue to increase.