A second mandatory approach to ethics is legal theory. Generally speaking, a “right” is a legitimate right against the behavior of another person – like my right not to be violated by you (see also human rights). Rights and obligations are linked in such a way that the rights of one person imply the duties of another person. For example, if I am allowed to pay $10 through Smith, Smith has a duty to pay me $10 $US. This is called the correlivity of rights and duties. The most influential report on legal theory is that of the 17th-century British philosopher John Locke, who argued that the laws of nature require that we nucinate to no one`s life, health, liberty, or possession. For Locke, it is our natural rights that have been given to us by God. According to Locke, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, recognizes three fundamental rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Jefferson and other jurists have argued that we derive from it other, more specific rights, including the rights to property, movement, speech, and religious expression. There are four characteristics that are traditionally related to moral rights. First, rights are natural in that they are not invented or created by governments. Second, they are universal in that they do not change from one country to another. Third, they are equal in the sense that rights are the same for all human beings, regardless of gender, race or disability. Fourth, they are inalienable, which means I cannot cede my rights to another person, for example. B by selling me to slavery. But I am where others were willing to stick to this distinction of accommodation between “ethical” and “moral.” [9] For example, Ricoeurs (1992) uses a similar distinction refers to “the primacy of ethics over morality,” with ethics referring to the inner character or characteristics we desire to be good in life, and morality refers to obligations or norms imposed from the outside and that others expect of us. My crude and voluntary distinction is simpler than Ricoeur`s great theory, which seeks to promote Aristotle`s school of ethics of virtue to Kant`s alternative school, strict adherence to duty.
Our two approaches converge in ethical thinking as a primacy over morality, even if our underlying justifications are different. Both approaches draw on Aristotle`s theory of virtue to illustrate the ethical content of contemporary role ethics. Both approaches see the theory of morality as another end. We are different in that my approach is quite pragmatic. I see morality as the world of confessional responsibility (for the good things we feel are fundamental that we would not like to compromise). As a result, I see ethics as the world of professional responsibility (for the good things we accept as part of our role, office, or job) . . .
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