OYEKAN OLUFEMI .T.
FEBRUARY, 2010
Ethics is defined as, “the study of that human good in its most general terms and how we human beings purse it.”(Aristotle 384 – 322 BC).Almost all of us try to live good lives, but we do not all agree on what makes life good. We can live a good by forgoing that we are entitled to in order to do something that will make life good for others. We have limitations as human beings, that is the reason God set us up in relationship with other people, our good will be found within those limits and relationships. When we put together a good life for ourselves, we find that this good life ties us to all sorts of people in some other ways, sometimes we may need to sacrifice our personal goals for the benefit of others. The good life is a choice, the distinction between ethics morals need to be made clear; Ethics is about thoughtful, reflective, and self conscious decisions, while morals are the rules people follow thinking about them. Goals are as varied as the people who set them; no single ideal for a good life fits all people. Goals have to be set with a whole life in mind because goals that seem good for the moment may not be appropriate in the long run.
For a worthy pursuit of our goals we have to arrive at appropriate rules that will govern the pursuit of these goals. Rules are very central to ethics, our understanding of them vary, but our different understanding of them provide a measure of objectivity for moral rules, since these rules have objectivity, we tend to come back to them at points of conflicts and uncertainty in the moral life. Rules tell other people what they can expect from us; and when we are in doubt, they can tell us what we ought to expect of ourselves. However, we have to balance between rules and goals that shape our moral life and make us the kind of people we are.
In addition to rules and goals, virtue is the third thing which provides the vocabulary in which we describe ourselves and other people morally. Classical and Christian traditions together have identified four of the cardinal virtues thee are; temperance, courage, prudence and justice. Christian writers have also noted that there are some virtues that are particularly important to the Christian life that come to us as God’s gift rather than as habits acquired by practice. Borrowing from the three abiding realities named in 1cor.13, Christian ethics has named these theological virtues as faith, hope, and love. Virtues whether acquired by practice or received as a gift, has to be lived out over a lifetime.
There are three main ways of thinking in ethics the following questions reveal them; what goals are we seeking? Are there rules we should follow? What sort of person am I likely to become if I make this choice and keep making others like it?
As Christians, we live our faith in community with others, and our Christian communities are usually the most important source of close friends and enduring support outside of our families. The church can be divided into three types; the ecumenical church, the confessional church, and the missional church. Each type of church has it plce in the Christian search for the good life. The relationship between the Christian search for the good life and the wider community beyond the church poses its own set of ethical challenges and opportunities.
How to relate the families and churches that shapes their search for a good life to the other group and powers around them has been a source of worry for Christians over the centuries. The qualities of a moral idealist and Christian realist a necessary for any Christian who wants to make his faith real in a social context.
The Christian faith offers a relationship between God and the moral life in away that is quite different from the one many people imagined. God meet us a lawgiver and as a judge, but also and primarily as the gracious one who accepts us despite our failure to live up to what the moral life require of us, and he restore our hope for the future despite our inability to take back what we have already done or make up for what we have failed to do in the past. An encounter with God’s gracious love will make living the moral life natural to us; it will become a way to love God and our neighbors as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment