The Dimensions Of Ethics

The dimensions of ethics

Since human reality has an inalienable social dimension, it is feasibleIn its most immediate environment, in accordance with an orderly conglomerate of values, the end of social ethics will be the critical reasoning about existing social configurations, and the joint work for the remodeling of said configurations -or the replacement of the sameFor new ones-, always from the perspective of the fundamental ethical issue, that is, what kind of person we intend to instruct, what kind of society we intend to form.

With other words, the aforementioned "personal ethics" focuses on the action performed by the subject and is characterized that the individual proceeds on himself and intentionally interacts with others, trying to execute certain values that he has chosen. On the other hand, "social ethics" is defined by the disappearance of the immediate union between each personal alternative or act and its practical effects. Thus, the person’s preference for concrete values cannot simpthrough complex social constructions.

Clarifying even more the antagonism between the personal and the social, it is feasible to value different levels of grouping or association of people: an informal group (consisting of friends or acquaintances) is not considerable in the same way than an institution (for example, a university), An organization (any company) or society itself, in general. Any of the examples presents shared responsibilities -or even collective -, although the responsibilities of individuals will always last individually, who can cooperate that the group of which they are part fulfills its function.

In this way, it can be treated, instead of two, three dimensions of ethics: the personal dimension (constantly present, since they are always people, whether alone or in groups), the organizational dimension (encompasses those intermediate strata in thethat the individual deals with the activities are granted in an institution) and the social dimension (result of the way of being both current and organizational in social relations and their structures).

The most current ethics pursues balance between the previous dimensions. In order to find some congruence among these, it could be "useful to sit the following principles" (Laraña, 2013):

1. "The personal dimension is the inalienable base of all morals", giving truth and complete sense. There is no moral behavior if there is no person who judges, chooses and work under their moral convictions (shared with others, but personally apprehended).
2. "But the person’s autonomy of action is not total.”Any human individual is subject to their own history, their psychology, the social groups with which it relates and the society of which it is part. Subject, in this case, it is not comparable to determined, since there are always possibilities that such an individual moves away from those conditioning enough to form a critical distance in relation to society and its institutions.
3. “The dependence between human subject and social structures is not unidirectional, but reciprocal."If the person needs the structures -although it is not completely -, they are automatically conditioned, in a way, by individuals, and even more if they work together. Thus, it is also convenient to speak of ethics when referring to the collective activity of people about these configurations of society (regardless of whether the intention is to transform or preserve them).