Ethical relativism is the theory that holds that morality is relative to the norms of one’s culture. That is, whether an action is right or wrong depends on the moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. The only moral standards against which a society’s practices can be judged are its own.

May 3, 2018 No Comments on Rule-based ethics. An approach to ethics management wherein the morality of an action is judge based on rules. When deviation from the code occurs, the organisation takes corrective action.

Utilitarianism is a theory of morality, which advocates actions that foster happiness or pleasure and opposes actions that cause unhappiness or harm. When directed toward making social, economic, or political decisions, a utilitarian philosophy would aim for the betterment of society as a whole.

Utilitarian ethics is a normative ethical system that is primarily concerned with the consequences of ethical decisions; therefore it can be described as a teleological theory or consequentialist theory , which are essentially the same thing, both having a notion that the consequence of the act is the most important …

The hallmark of teleological moral theories is that they connect these moral concepts (right and wrong) with pleasure and pain, or happiness and unhappiness. The historical moral doctrine that associates pleasure with moral goodness is called hedonism.

: exhibiting or relating to design or purpose especially in nature.

Marx portrays history as a progressive development from feudalism to capitalism, to communism. He is often criticized for treating history, in a Hegelian fashion, as a teleological process that aims from the start toward a final culmination, a classless society.

The word telos means something like purpose, or goal, or final end. According to Aristotle, everything has a purpose or final end. If we want to understand what something is, it must be understood in terms of that end, which we can discover through careful study.

The Greek term telos refers to what we might call a purpose, goal, end or true final function of an object. The telos of a chair, for example, may be to provide a seat and a chair is a good chair when it supports the curvature of the human bottom without collapsing under the strain.

Ethos is a greek word which roughly translates to “moral character”. The idea of ethos as a means of persuasion was conceived by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his work Rhetoric (sometimes called On Rhetoric). In Rhetoric, Aristotle establishes three primary modes of argument: ethos, logos, and pathos.

Aristotle believed that animals, like humans, have purpose, and that telos is natural and unchanging. In his stockperson ethics, animals are ordered to rational human purposes through husbandry, and good practice is established and shared by experience, habituation and training.

Virtue ethics–which I introduced in my last post–is an approach to moral philosophy that starts with good lives and good character instead of right action. A life is good when it fulfills its purpose, its “telos.” The telos of human life is eudaimonia, or flourishing.