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Article: Ethics: time to revisit the basics.
- Article from:
- The Humanist
- Article date:
- March 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 American Humanist Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Ethics could be said to be very much like the weather in the sense that everybody talks about it but nobody does much about it.
Nearly all of us acknowledge the importance of ethics. Most of us hope for and expect ethical behavior and treatment from particular segments of society. Some of us pay close attention to the subject and seek to engage others in discussing (and practicing) it. But regrettably few of us really understand ethics as well as we think we do or as well as we should.
When people discuss ethics, there is a widespread tendency to gloss over the fundamental nature of the subject--as if it is so widely and well understood as to obviate the ...