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The Epic Interactive Encyclopedia 1998
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Epic Interactive Encyclopedia, The - 1998 Edition (1998)(Epic Marketing).iso
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Ethics
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1992-09-02
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Area of philosophy concerned with human
values, which studies the meanings of moral
terms and theories of conduct and goodness;
also called moral philosophy. It is one of
the three main branches of contemporary
philosophy. The study of ethics began in
ancient India and China, and began to be
systematized by the Greek philosopher
Socrates in the 5th century BC. Plato's
Republic is an exposition of the nature of
justice or righteousness, and ethical theory
was advanced by Aristotle's Nicomachean
Ethics and similar writings. The Cyrenaics,
Epicureans, and Stoics advanced theories that
have been many times revived. The `Christian
ethic' is mainly a combination of New
Testament moral teaching with ideas drawn
from Plato and Aristotle, combining hedonism
and rationalism. Medieval scholasticism saw
God's will as the ethical standard but
tempered it with Aristotelian ethics. In the
17th-18th centuries, Thomas Hobbes and David
Hume were notable British ethical
philosophers. One of the greatest
contributors to ethical theory was the German
Immanuel Kant, an idealist, with his
`categorical imperative' (the obligation to
obey absolute moral law), since conscience is
to ethics as intelligence is to logic. The
utilitarian ethic (for the good of society
rather than the individual) was in the UK
expounded in the 18th-19th centuries by
Jeremy Bentham, J S Mill, and Herbert
Spencer, and opposed by F H Bradley and T H
Green, who linked ethics with metaphysics and
emphasized the place of the individual in
organized society. Utilitarianism has become
the ostensible basis for law, politics,
commerce, and social ethics, while conscience
guides the individual. Ethicists of the 20th
century include G E Moore and C D Broad in
the UK and John Dewey in the USA.