LYCOS RETRIEVER
Ethics: Practices
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Ethics laws ... prohibited the use of campaign funds for personal expenses. But no set of ethics laws will ever be final because political and financial practices, and public opinion, are constantly changing.
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A complete revolution in ethics was introduced by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). From the wreck of pure theoretical reason he turned for rescue to practical reason, in which he found an absolute, universal, and categorical moral law. This law is not to be conceived as an enactmnt of external authority, for this would be heteromony, which is foreign to true morality; it is rather the law of our own reason, which is, therefore, autonomous, that is, it must be observed for its own sake, without regard to any pleasure or utility arising therefrom. Only that will is morally good which obeys the moral law under the influence of such a subjective principle or motive as can be willed by the individual to become the universal law for all men. The followers of Kant have selected now one now another doctrine from his ethics and combined therewith various pantheistical systems. Fichte places man's supreme good and destiny in absolute spontaniety and liberty; Schleiermacher, in co-operating with the progressive civilization of mankind.
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Although ethics has always been viewed as a branch of philosophy, its all-embracing practical nature links it with many other areas of study, including anthropology, biology, economics, history, politics, sociology, and theology. Yet, ethics remains distinct from such disciplines because it is not a matter of factual knowledge in the way that the sciences and other branches of inquiry are. Rather, it has to do with determining the nature of normative theories and applying these sets of principles to practical moral problems.
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Some philosophers rely on descriptive ethics and choices made and unchallenged by a society or culture to derive categories, which typically vary by context. This leads to situational ethics and situated ethics. These philosophers often view aesthetics and etiquette and arbitration as more fundamental, percolating 'bottom up' to imply, rather than explicitly state, theories of value or of conduct. In these views ethics is not derived from a top-down a priori "philosophy" (many would reject that word) but rather is strictly derived from observations of actual choices made in practice:
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Ethics deals with such questions at all levels. Its subject consists of the fundamental issues of practical decision making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong.
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There is no Buddhist term which exactly corresponds to ‘ethics’ as a branch of philosophy concerned with the analysis and evaluation of conduct in the way the subject is classified in the West. Instead, the various rules of moral conduct are subsumed under the rubric of śīla, which denotes internalized moral virtue and its expression in practice as abstention from immoral conduct. As far as monks are concerned, the Vinaya provides an externally enforced code for the regulation of communal life.
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