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Ethics and Western Discourse

Ethics has been a part of Western discourse since the earliest formulation of Western discourse. Aristotle's famous Nichomachean Ethics is aimed at addressing the gap in the young man's moral education and so to cultivate ethics, which is identified with virtue, and prepare him for eventual rulership of the body politic. He states that "moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name ethike is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit)" (1947, p. 331). Thus ethics, or virtue, is a lifelong effort of learning. It is important for young people to learn to be good. Not bad advice, even for 333 BC or so. Aristotle, of course, is just one example of a major Western philosopher who took ethics as his subject, and his work can be set beside the ethical injunctions of such texts as the Bible. The relevant point is that the modern world is the beneficiary of several thousand years of serious philosophical examination of ethical conduct. Thus it might seem as if ours would have evolved into the most ethical and honest civil society imaginable because we have had plenty of time to form honest habits.

Alas, such is not the case. Indeed, in The Cheating Culture, David Callahan argues that the reverse is so often true that abandonment of such values as hard work and fairness in favor of seeking immediate advantage through expediency, has become a social norm. Callahan offers a series of examples to demonstrate how far afield people have strayed from honest behavior in favor of cheating. He begins with 9/11, when destruction of financial computer records enabled thousands of individuals to overdraw cash on their ATM accounts, anticipating that the records could never be reconstructed; they were, and "scores of arrests" resulted (Callahan, 2004, p. 3). Elsewhere, Callahan cites practices at Merrill Lynch, a brokerage firm, that led famous stock analysts to hype high-priced but low-value stocks instead o...

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Ethics and Western Discourse. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:41, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689291.html