Law And Reflective Ethics

Business Ethics

Exam 1 Essay Questions

Question #1

The ideal relationship between law and reflective ethics in a properly ordered society is that they are similar in that they both require the same behavior up until a minimal point of the law, when it is the duty of the government to leave the moral decision up to the individual. It is a moral standard that law be kept to a minimum. This is because even though the government wants to protect us, they do not want to limit us and infringe on other rights we may have.

An example that demonstrates how reflective ethics and law differ would be the laws imposed on Germans by the Third Reich of Hitler. By law, people were forced to perform acts considered morally wrong. The legal obligations and the moral obligations of the German people conflicted. An example of what reflective ethics and law share in common would be laws that prohibit acts such as murder, rape, and armed robbery. Laws protect the human rights that all humans are entitled to have. Law and ethics are not the same, laws change from area to area, as ethics are a universal behavior code. In an ideal society laws are not to require that people go against their moral standards, but should overlap with human moral standards. Then, when a point is reached outside the reaches of the law, reflective ethics emerges and is the sole responsibility of the individual to be upheld.

Question 2

Conventional morality and reflective ethics differ in a few very important

Ways. "Conventional morality is the raw material to be perfected by reflective

Ethics." What this means is that conventional morality is only a set of moral beliefs that we uphold which was given to us by peers, adults, and the people that surround us, but reflective ethics is the ability we have to make our own moral decisions and judge our own moral issues for ourselves.

Conventional ethics is a code put together from the examples set forth by the society around us. An adolescent who is at this level is able to put his/herself in the position of others, but is still close minded in that the individual thinks in terms of what their peers think, family values, and legal obligations, as opposed to self concluded decisions. An example of this would be how an adolescent male driver, using conventional