What are the fundamental concepts of ethics?

Answer 1

There are four types of ethical dilemmas.

1. Loyalty versus truth

2. Justice versus mercy

3. Short term versus long term

4. Individual versus community

Answer 2

Fundamental Concepts in Ethics"Ethics" may be broadly defined as that division of philosophy which deals with questions concerning the nature of value in matters of human conduct.

While virtually all people are concerned with making ethical judgments and decisions, philosophers in particular are concerned to

a) explicate the nature of such judgments in generaland

b) provide criteria for determining what is ethically right or wrong, and

c) analyze the grounds or reasons we have for holding them to be correct.

Those concerned exclusively with telling us what is right or wrong, good or bad, in matters of human conduct may be termed "moralists." While philosophers have sometimes been moralists, as philosophers their primary concern is not so much to provide moral prescriptions as it is to explain why what we consider to be "right" or "good" is right or good. To do so, philosophers engaged with such questions have generally sought to formulate and justify "ethical theories" which are intended to explain the fundamental nature of that which is "good," why it is "good," and why the ethical principles which are most commonly used to evaluate human conduct follow (or do not follow) from this theory of that which is good.

While there are of course many words in English (as well as most languages) which refer to positive and negativevalues, we may simplify our vocabulary by taking the words "good" and "bad" to refer to positive and negative values respectively in judgments with respect to people and things, and "right" or "wrong" to refer to positive and negative values respectively with respect to actions. In this way of speaking, then, a "good person" will simply be one whose actions are "right" by the criteria of whatever ethical theory is the basis of such a judgment.

If we restrict attention to actions, any "action" may be analyzed as involving an actor, the person who does the action, and an end result or outcome of the action. In ethical terminology the actor is called the "agent," and the end result is the "consequence" of the action.

Ethical theories may be presented for various purposes. Some theories may merely purport to describe what people do, in fact (so it is claimed), consider to be "good" or "right." Such theories are "descriptive ethical theories" and may be considered "true" or "false" depending on whether or not they do indeed describe correctly what people in fact do consider good or right. Since such descriptive theories are concerned with what people actually do believe and what motivates them to believe what they do, such theories are strictly speaking more the concern of psychology than philosophy, and their acceptability is a matter of whether or not the empirical evidence indicates that what they say about human values is in fact the case. Since they are restricted to telling us what isthe case, descriptive ethical theories cannot serve as the basis for making claims intended to change or persuadepeople to act or think otherwise than the way they do.

In contrast to descriptive ethical theories, those ethical theories which are intended to justify judgments concerning what people ought or should do (or not do), are called "normative ethical theories." Normative theories characteristically yield ethical judgments which have in them the key concept of "ought" or "should" (or some such synonym). Their concern is not with what is the case, but with what should be the case; they are concerned not with the "real" (what is so), but with the "ideal" (what ought to be). As such, unlike a purely descriptive theory, a normative theory cannot be "refuted" by appeal to the facts of human behavior, for the defender of a normative claim can always reply, yes, it is true people do not in fact behave this way, but they ought to. Normative theories are not the concern of psychologists, but of philosophers and (typically) moralists. The person who seeks to change, to improveor reform, human behavior must defend a normativetheory, and it is this kind of theory which most people have in mind in examining what philosophers have to say about ethics.

Answer 3

An ethical dilemma is a complex situation that involves an apparent mental conflict between one or more moral imperatives. Obeying one would result in transgressing of the other.
A very good example of this is from Sutter Health: "You are a physician and some may think it is time to withdraw life support and let nature take its course, yet the dying patient’s family insists that you 'do everything possible' to keep the patient alive. You're unclear how to solve this problem and worry that 'doing everything' might cause the patient pain and discomfort without offering any benefit."