Importance Of Ethical Judgements

Who appoints ethical limits that prevail in our society? Is every individual responsible for their own actions even though their morals may be different from others? Ethical judgments are made for every individual separately and some of them are based on their own emotions or their own reason. There are many factors that influence ethical judgments in a society or culture. In my essay I will use reason and emotion as ways of knowing, because I believe that in order to make an ethical judgment in both the natural sciences and arts a person’s emotion and reason play a role. Discovering new knowledge in natural sciences is mostly done with controlled experiments, while artists can express their knowledge in a different way with pictures, sculptures, movies… In both areas of knowledge ethics cannot be excluded. Art has more freedom to express without getting negative feedback from spectators or society, while a natural scientist must be aware of lots of ethical limits in order that their experiment would be ethically acceptable. My claim is that ethical judgments do limit the methods available in the production of knowledge in arts and natural sciences, but the limitations are stricter when it comes to conducting experiments than creating art works. Ideally an objective view should be considered when evaluating this claim but our emotions can be stumbling blocks to ethical judgments.

Firstly it has to be considered that if there were no experiments done with modern medicine that achieved something that was previously unimaginable, there would not be as big progress in medicine. The experiments for creating, testing and improving that medicine were done in some ways that can be ethically questionable. Ethical limits were reached and ...

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...ng on a situation. Ethical judgments to some extent limit the available methods in order to get new knowledge. But the last question that needs to be answered: what if there would be no ethical limits? Everything would be allowed and no limits in researches. In natural sciences is more essential to follow ethical limits than in art, because when ethical limit is reaches in experiment that means that harm is cause to a person or society. If scientist would try to ignore it more harm would be done than good. When artists reach the ethical limit he/she should try to pass it because it will trigger more response from people. Unless if the artists try their art in a way that causes harm or danger to others and themselves. Already in the ancient Greek ethics was discussed by Aristotle and Plato and therefore I think ethics cannot be ignored in any area of knowledge.