Introduction:

A Preliminary
Inquiry into the
Nature and
We are fellow travelers. A
Foundations of
hiker on a hilltop, looking
out overMorality
the countryside 
stretching away in all
directions beneath his gaze, 
is in a good position to
describe
to a friend some of the
characteristic features of
the terrain
they plan to explore.
 
Servais Pinckaers, OP
2. Ethics: What does it mean?
When I respond to readers’ queries, I
Ethics is the rational
work from this premise: Ethics is the
determination
rational determination of
of
right
right
conduct.
conduct, an attempt to answer the
Ethics
question isshould
“How not Ijust
act now?”
knowing;
Ethics it is it is do-
is not just knowing;
doing.
ing. And so it is necessarily a civic
virtue, concerned with how we are to
aincivic
live society; it demands an un-
virtue of how our actions af-The ETHICIST
derstanding
fect other people. Randy Cohen
The New York
Times Magazine
 In considering an ethical question, I
set of
refer to a set of principles I cherish as
principles/values
profoundly moral. This constellation of
values includes honesty, kindness,
compassion,
increase the generosity,
supply fairness.
of I
embrace actions that will increase the
human happiness
supply of human happiness, that will
not contribute to human suffering, that
are concordant with an egalitarian
augment
society,human freedom
that will augment human
freedom, particularly freedom of
thought and expression.
"What does ethics mean to you?"
Among the replies were:

"Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell

me is right or wrong."
"Ethics has to do with my religious beliefs."
"Being ethical is doing what the law
requires."
"Ethics consists of the standards of behavior
our society accepts."
"I don't know what the word means."
1. Ethics: What do we mean?
a. Etymological (De Finance, 3):
- “ethos”
ethos - ‘custom, a habitual way of acting,
char-acter’; Latin terms “mos,” “moris” also
connote. Among Greeks, “ethics” meant what
concerns hu-man conduct/human action.
b. Descriptive ethics (4):
- Concern of cultural anthropologists and socio-
logists. Its task is to describe how some person,
members of a culture, or society address all
sorts of moral issues, what customs they have,

moralit
and so how they are accustomed to behave.
C. Meta-ethics:
■ Concerns itself with the logic of moral dis-
course, meanings of moral terms - like good
and bad, right and wrong, duties and right,
etc.
■ Concern is with the understanding of the
use of these terms, their logical forms, and
the “objects” to which they refer.
■ Concern of meta-ethicists is even more
fundamental: What is the possibility of mor-
al philosophy?
D. Normative ethics (5):
Normative can be understood in two
ways:
1) One can have in mind the art of
living, the technique for acquiring
happiness (understood in an
individual or in Teleological
a social sense).

2) It can be also understood as the

science which is concerned with
what is worthy of a human being. To
live rightly will not then be the
equivalent of: Deontological
to live happily, but:
to live as one should.
 Summar
• [Normative] ethics y
is concerned
with what man ought to do so as to
live as he ought to, so as to be what
he ought to become, so as to attain
his supreme value, so as to be true
to his raison d’être, true to that
towards which and for which he
• an (De
exists. inquiry
Finance,into
6) the norms or
principles of justifiable behavior and
the values they embody.
 Objections to the Possibility of
Ethics
1. Metaphysical (8):
(8) no such thing as “human nature”
common to all human beings.
2. Logical Positivism (Empiricism) (8-9): all meaningful
propositions must be a tautology or empirically ver-
ifiable.
3. Religious (11):
(11) a purely rational ethics is radically
insufficient because knowledge of the end of man is
beyond its reach.
4. Cultural Relativism:
Relativism what is right or wrong depends
on one’s culture.
3. Morality as freedom for self-determination
■ freedom in morality
■ how much freedom do we need to
make sense of morality?
■ relation between freedom and religious belief
Freedom in morality -
● ground of morality / source of morality. (If I
am to make a moral choice, I must be free to do, or not to do, the
thing in question.)
● distinguish between freedom in general and
free will (“I did it!”; deliberate choice; autono-
mous; self-determining act).
● not claim that we are absolutely free.
● not claim that we are free of every external,
even internal, influence on our choices and
actions.
● mode-of-being in the world
“We cannot be told that we ought to do
something, unless we CAN do it.”
● What is
freedom?
Capacity of man for self-determination - the
capacity to go beyond what he is as he finds
himself at the start, the capacity to deliberate, to
make plans, to make decisions, to act, to adopt a
way of life, in brief, that power of causality in
man called the free will.
● Freedom as self-determination is the
source and ground of all ethics.

Freedom is not a mere possibility but a task, a

duty. It is at this point that that the ethical
properly emerges in man, in so far as man’s
mode of being is a certain ought-to-be, a
certain call to freedom.
● Freedom as a mode of being-in-the-
world!
The moral task of actualizing one’s possibility
to be free is incumbent on man not in the
abstract but as a concrete being - as an
organic and psychic self living within an
environment defined by physical nature, social
institutions and historical conditions. (Reyes,
14)

Hence, the task of actualization begins in

some given situation, which is at the same
time a certain state of both freedom and
bondage, of freedom-unfreedom.
In the fundamental task for self-realization,
man as moral will is confronted not only with
the situation of freedom-unfreedom.

Man finds himself in a paradoxical bind:

He sees himself as a fundamental “ought-to-

be” - a task, project, that also has a capacity
to do violence to himself and others.
 Reality of MORAL
EVIL
The experience of moral evil tends
to put into question the sense of
the whole fundamental moral
project of free will seeking and
realizing itself, thus leaving man in
a great dilemma.

Man’s inhumanity to
man
● How do we respond to this
dilemma?
Options for the struggling moral will:
– Cynicism: the moral endeavor, in other
words, is considered as mere illusion or sheer
duplicity.
– Stoic affirmation of moral project despite all
adversities: deny the reality of evil itself and
think of evil as reducible to manageable
human proportions eventually to be over-
come by human progress.
– One can persistently determine oneself or
attempt to fulfill oneself, a task demanded by
morality itself, but sustaining this task by
some form of religious faith.
 ...a task
demanded by
morality
itself.
“One can
persistently ...sustained
determine oneself by some
or attempt to fulfill
oneself, a task form of
demanded
morality itself, but
by religious
sus-taining this faith.
task by some form
of religious faith.”
 ● Question for the moral will:
“Why be good?”
The project of freedom is
consoled by the belief in the
promise of some form of
everlasting life in union with the
transcendent, the Absolute.

?
The moral quest is sustained by
L
i s
some form of religious faith.
A
th ON
The difference between a “good
s faith”
man Iof T I and a “good man”
R A
is that the former is confirmed in
his moral postulate and task that
he must go on seeking and
actualizing himself.
THE MORAL LIFE IS NOT
ABSURD!