Philosophy is an ancient study, for centuries it has involved the most powerful minds of humanity in the discussions of the most fundamental aspects and problems of human life such as existence, the meaning of life, nature of knowledge, morals and values, the relationship between good and evil, the appearance of ideas. Philosophy is a broad study and it is divided into several different areas, are metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, besides there are such fields as philosophy of religion, political philosophy and non-western philosophy. All of these branches are interconnected, the areas they explore are related to one another, the concepts they study are not isolated and not individual for each branch, they are present in many different areas. Metaphysics is considered to be the most fundamental of all of these branches.
Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the questions of morals, values, proper or improper decisions and actions, right and wrong deeds. This study explores the nature of values people have and their origin, how humans came up with a system of values and why certain things are considered good or bad. The questions ethics raises are connected to the philosophy of religion, as religions are sets of beliefs and rules of moral behavior. Ethics explores whether these rules were brought to humans together with the appearance of religions or having morals has always been a part of human nature. Ethics is important for us because our morals are the foundation of all of the decisions we make, and as it is stated by metaphysics – all actions have their causes and their results.
The concepts that are used in ethics the most are justice and crime, right and wrong, good and evil, vice and virtue. Ethics describes different points of view on the types of conduct and judgments. Philosophers explore such ethical problems as the sources of moral notions and norms, the standards of morals in society. For example, there are philosophers that see morals as the set of norms dictated to humanity from the above. The source of morals, according to John Locke, is divine. According to Immanuel Kant, human morals have a non-psychological origin; they are the so-called “categorical imperative”. Happiness is considered by the majority of philosophers as the main ethical value and the most important ethical goal of humanity. Aristotle was a supporter of eudemonistic views, according to his ideas, happiness is the main motive of a moral deed. Kant criticized Aristotle’s approach saying that modals are dictated by the feeling of duty, not by the urge for happiness.
Many philosophers argued about various aspects of ethics. Plato and Aristotle had very different views on virtue, for example. Plato has created a theory of a separately standing world of ideas, presenting virtue as an independent concept that exists on its own. In this theory, absolute virtue is the source of all other virtues. Aristotle was a supporter of materialistic views, so he denied the concept of virtue as a separate category. According to Aristotle, virtue is something that can be defined by various measurements such as quality and quantity. Both of these philosophers viewed physiological desires as something that had to be managed, but Plato considered the human body to be the prison for the soul and all the desires to be the vicious boundaries that create limits for spiritual development. According to Plato, freedom and self-improvement can only be achieved when the mind takes over the temptations. Aristotle viewed desires as the traits of the uncivilized part of the human soul. His idea of moral self-improvement lay in the development of control over the basic desires and gradual cognition.
Evaluating this argument of idealistic and materialistic views on the virtues, the sources of morals and happiness, we can see that Aristotle saw all the ethical concepts as values that could be measured. For Plato, they are more abstract. Aristotle’s practical approach is explained by his idea that happiness depends on many conditions, it is individual for everyone. Plato’s utopia does not consider individualities. He divides humans according to their social functions. It is a well-known fact that utopias are implausible, this is why, to my mind, Plato’s views are boarded with fantasies, while Aristotle’s ideas present a set of practical instructions for self-improvement and moral development.
To conclude, science still has no explanation of why, how and when the human mind started to develop the sense of morals, but, to my mind, the source of moral and ethical judgments is psychological and determined by the process of evolution of the human brain. I think, humans live according to the laws of nature and are directed by the natural instincts, yet, due to the evolutional development of our brain, we have a more advanced understanding of the laws of nature and, this is why, in general, all humans relate to the same basic set of moral standards. To explain this conclusion, I would like to compare human behavior to the behavior of a fish shoal, all of the members of that group have exactly the same reactions to various situations, it even looks like the shoal moves as a whole organism. Human ways of thinking are also very similar; this is why all over the world societies have eventually come up with the same basic moral norms.