Read text A carefully paying attention to the words in bold type.

Text A. Ethics: The Main Aspects

How to behave toward oneself and toward other individuals is a matter of making choices: whether to be friendly or unfriendly; whether to tell the truth or lie; whether to be generous or greedy; whether to study in order to pass an exam or to spend valuable study time watching television and cheat to pass it. These, and all other questions about how people act toward themselves and one another are dealt with in a field of study called ethics. Another name for ethics is morality. One word is derived from the Greek ethos, meaning "character," and the other from the Latin mores, meaning " custom. " The Greek philosopher Aristotle had a better term - practical wisdom. It was called practical because it was concerned with action, both on the part of the individual and on the part of society. It had to do with what should or should not be done. He divided practical wisdom into two parts: moral philosophy and political philosophy.

On the one hand, human activity is supposed to be simply a matter of custom or habit that little thought may be given to many actions. When an individual in Western society gets up in the morning, it is normal to get dressed and to put on shoes before going out. But in doing so, one does not usually bother thinking "This is a good and necessary thing that I'm doing." On the other hand, there is a great deal of behaviour, in which people are conscious of why they act in a certain way. They are confronted with the need to make choices. At the basis of choice two questions arise: "What good do I seek?" and "What is my obligation in this circumstance?"

Ethics is primarily concerned with attempting to define what is good for the individual and for society. It also tries to establish the nature of obligations, or duties, that people owe themselves and each other.

Philosophers have said for thousands of years that people do not willingly do what is bad for themselves but may do what is bad for others. It has always been difficult to define what is good and how one should act to achieve it. Some teachers have said that pleasure is the greatest good, (study Epicureanism). Others have pointed to knowledge, personal virtue, or service to one's fellow human being. The philosopher of the 1700s who ranks with Aristotle and Plato of ancient times is Immanuel Kant. He set forth a chain of explosive ideas that humanity has continued to ponder since his time. Kant's most famous work was the 'Critique of Pure Reason' (published in German in 1781). In it he tried to set up the difference between things of the outside world and actions of the mind. He said that things that exist in the world are real, but the human mind is needed to give them order and form and to see the relationships between them. Only the mind can surround them with space and time. The principles of mathematics are part of the space-time thoughts supplied by the mind to real things. For example, we see only one or two walls of a house at any one time. The mind gathers up these sense impressions of individual walls and mentally builds a complete house. Thus the whole house is being created in the mind while our eyes see only a part of the whole. Kant said that thoughts must be based on real things. Pure reason without reference to the outside world is impossible. We know only what we first gather up with our senses. Yet living in the real world does not mean that ideals should be abandoned.

In his 'Critique of Practical Reason' (1788) he argued for a stern morality. His basic idea was in the form of a Categorical Imperative. This meant that humans should act so well that their conduct could give rise to a universal law.

Ethics tries to introduce order into the way people think about life and action. Ethical theories aim to bring order into ordinary thinking by telling us which of our conflicting ideas apply to what we should do and which ones do not apply.

Aesthetics is the study, or science, of the beautiful. Aesthetics is also the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty, the arts, and taste. The term is derived from the Greek word meaning "sense perception." The basic question for aesthetics is How do humans judge what is beautiful? Is it a reasoned assessment, or is it merely an emotional preference?

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