Professional Ethics: A Guide to Moral Principles and Actions
What is Professional Ethics?
Professional ethics derives from general ethics. Its objective is to apply general ethical principles to the specific activities of each profession.
The Concept of Ethics
Ethics is the systematic and orderly study of the morality of human actions. It is a theory-practice discipline:
- Theoretical: Knowing what is good.
- Practical: Applying that knowledge to guide good actions.
Moral Dimension of Human Actions
Human actions originate from intellect and will and must have freedom. They have a moral dimension because they are born of conscious choice.
The Natural Moral Law
Born and springing from human nature is the light of reason that allows us to understand the reality of moral principles, which are known in a general sense.
Properties of the Natural Moral Law:
- Universal: It extends to all people in all circumstances, especially in their individual acts.
- Cognoscible: Every person can know it by reason.
- Unchangeable: It does not change through the years.
Types of Law:
- Eternal Law: The order that God placed in the different beings or in various natures.
- Natural Law: The order that God placed in humankind; it is the participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.
- Human Law: The law that humankind enacts; a particularized expression of the natural moral law.
Freedom, Natural Moral Law, and Happiness
Freedom is fully exercised in the right order. It is realized when we choose between different goods. However, we can also choose between good and evil. Choosing good exercises freedom in the most perfect way, oriented toward the ultimate end. Choosing wrong exercises freedom, but imperfectly, moving away from the ultimate end.
The natural moral law, by determining what is good and bad, is the path that leads to ultimate freedom or happiness.
Voluntary Acts
A voluntary act comes from deliberate action. It is an event where a person acts knowingly, understanding the reason for ordering an end.
Types of Voluntary Acts:
- Acts of Unlawful Voluntary or Interiors: Made through the inner faculties of a person, such as understanding and imagining.
- Acts Volunteers Imperatives: Born of the will, but involving other bodily faculties, such as the body and senses.
Exemplary Actions
Copies: The influence that love or simply the provision of my action may have on the will of others. This influence can be positive or negative.
Cooperation
Cooperation: Lending support to an action autonomously decided upon by another.
- Formal Cooperation: Direct support given to the actions of another.
- Material Cooperation: Indirect support; an individual may not tolerate another’s imposed action, repudiating it inwardly but not intervening to prevent it, because they want to achieve some good or avoid some evil.
Types of Material Cooperation in Evil:
- Direct or Immediate Material Cooperation: Occurs when one helps another to perform the evil act, perhaps required by some threat or circumstance.
- Indirect Material Cooperation: When someone provides a tool used to do evil.
- Proximate and Remote Cooperation: Relates to the physical or psychological closeness between one’s action and that of another person.
Moral Ignorance
Moral ignorance is a wrong understanding of the morality of an action.
Types of Ignorance:
Invincible: is one that fully dominates consciousness and leaves no opportunity to be provided or accepted involuntary. No avoidable moral responsibility: it can be noticed or exceeded, but remains in negligence or laziness
Explain the factors that may affect the free will of action: Fear: vacillation of mind to wake up to the present evil future self that threatens us and which influences the will of the actor. The passions moves or acts of the sensitive appetites in themselves are neither good nor bad.Violence: promotion of an internal factor that leads us to act against the will. Perversion: diminished responsibility if there are efforts to remove it. When not fighting the vice, it is responsible for the acts performed. Define the criteria for the moral evaluation of actions. Explain how each of these influences the morality of action: They are integral elements of each action Object: is the action itself finalizada.Lo chosen and that the person decided to make short, it is the intention that the d subject possesses. Circumstances: factors surrounding and influencing action on his morality. Characteristics or qualities of the person actúa.Cualidad or quantity of the object. Means used.All elements of the action must be good if some of the action loses its bondad.Las bad circumstances increase or diminish the goodness or evil of an act, could also turn into bad action without such circumstances would not. Define action with indirect effects. Mention the conditions grapevine that this type of action is morally permissible: when to perform an action, besides the direct effect to be pursued it further effect is still not the intention, if not that only tolera.La action that is chosen must be good in itself, or at least indifferent. The immediate effect that occurs should be the subject intends bueno.Que good good, and bad only exist tolere.Debe what a dire need to tolerate the negative effect. What is conscience? Define modalities. Explain the principles to follow conscience. Define the deformation of consciousness:Conscience: the trial of intelligence or reason from the moral law opinion on whether the goodness or evil of a particular act. Modalities 1) In relation to action: Awareness antecedent is what I judge on an action that is to make sending it, allowing it, advising, etc. forbidding. Consciousness consistent: it approves or disapproves the action already undertaken to produce satisfaction or peace after good actions and remorse after the bad. 2) In view of conformity with the natural moral law: Awareness straight or true: the judging the goodness or evil of an action in accordance with natural law. Consciousness misleading or false:is that judges disagree with the moral law as well considering a move that actually is bad or vice versa. The cause of the failure of this trial in ignorance. 3) by type of agreement: knowledge true judge is the firm that an action is good or bad. Knowledge probable: is that judgments on the morality of an act admitting two possibilities that are opposite. Consciousness doubtful: it is the suspension of judgments of conscience, intelligence to judge an action to be unable to conclude and not decided by the goodness or evil of the action. Principles: The deformities of consciousness Laxa: is one that removes any unfounded reason of bad acts that really have it.Cauterized: is one that by the frequent repetition of a certain type of events goes as far as vices are not noticing or not noticing gravity malice in it. Pharisee: mu makes the person sensitive to some external events, but simultaneously allows evil unscrupulous matter of great importance. scrupulous is feared that without good reasons to have committed any wrong.