INTRODUCTION TO ETHICS

All around us, we are jammed with moral norms that tend to influence practically every aspect of our lives. Societies today face so many moral challenges. Most people have lost a sense of moral responsibility and this has led to moral degradation in society. We do often condemn certain acts as unethical/immoral and praise others as ethically commendable. Nonetheless, we are in most cases not conscious of such moral norms and we tend to take them for granted, yet they continue to exist. These norms are mostly unwritten, and they usually lack an enforcer. Wherever we go, we cannot run away from these norms. It is then expected that being so much around us as they are, these norms should be known to everyone, but this is not the case. It is therefore upon this background that this course tries to assess the human moral development and moral reasoning within the social environment as it introduces students to Ethics, its foundations, the theories that inform ethics, and finally on how human acts can be judged.