We explain what ethical values are and some examples of this set of values. In addition, the aesthetic and moral values.
What are ethical values?
When speaking of ethical values we refer to social and cultural concepts that serve as a guide in the behavior of an individual or an organization. That is to say, it is about ideal considerations, the duty to be or the socially accepted and valued norm of things. Therefore, they are not usually absolute values, nor universal, nor eternal, but they change as the society that respects them does.
The purpose of ethical values is keep the rules of the game of a society clear, with regard to the performance of specific functions (and quotas of power) within it.
For example, professional sectors adhere to ethical codes whose compliance is usually monitored by a college or union; but also public officials or representatives elected to public office, acquire together with the power an ethical commitment to use it for the common good and not exclusively for their personal benefit.
Ethics, for its part, is a branch of philosophy that studies the notions of good and evil, right and wrong, in the cultural framework of values of a society at a given time, taking into account the changes inherent in the history of human thought and its considerations around itself. Thus, ethics is also a set of norms and values that govern a specific human group at a specific time in its history and culture.
Examples of ethical values
They are ethical values, for example:
- Freedom, or the commitment to self-determination of each person and the ability to think and act for himself.
- Responsibility, or face the consequences of one’s actions and decisions.
- Honesty, or commitment to the truth.
- Loyalty, or the commitment to one’s own values or one’s own group of belonging, beyond the specific and personal benefit.
- Justice, or the commitment to truth and equity for the common good.
As will be seen, human societies acquire a commitment to these concepts and seek the method that best suits them (or most seduces them) to comply with them, although at the same time they may be violated individually or collectively. In that case, people with unethical.
What are aesthetic values?
Aesthetic values are those linked with a certain sense of beauty or harmony. They are not linked to the moral or ethical judgment of things, that is, if they are good or bad, convenient or not, but simply if they are beautiful or not, taking into account that the concept of beauty varies throughout the history of humanity and the different cultures and traditions that share the time.
What are moral values?
Moral values, unlike ethical ones, start from a spiritual principle of jurisprudence, that is, from what is right and what is wrong, and are supported by tradition: cultural, religious, ancestral, etc.
Religions tend to be, nowadays, the bastions of morals and “good customs” in contemporary societies, which is why their points of view tend to clash with the most advanced or avant-garde notions of society. Hence, moral values They are usually reactionary and are often defended by the status what conservative.
See more: Moral values