Describe the historical developments of both traditional and modern ethics?
This question requires a very long answer. Moreover, if it’s for a course, the answer will depend upon what the profesor has had you read in class. Briefly, ethics has three traditional “fields” represented by three figures: 1. Virtue ethics, represented by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. This places the value of action in two things: virtues (or functions, or character attributes, such as courage, temperance, friendliness, etc) and a purpose (telos) to be acheived. For Aristotle, the goal is Eudaimonia, or human flourishing, also translated (poorly) as happiness. 2. Deontological ethics, represented by Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. This place the value of an action in it being done from DUTY. Deonto- is from the Greek, meaning “bound,” so, it is “the study of what we are bound, by duty, to do. Kant’s system depends upon the following claims. First, an IMPERATIVE is a objective principle (or rule) necessitating for a will (or: that a person is required to do
