Professional Values and Ethics Paper

Professional Values and Ethics Paper

Group A

GEN200

May 26, 2010

Sally Walters

Professional Values and Ethics Paper

What are values and ethics; to many people it means a variety of different meanings. This is just brushing the surface of facts about professional values and ethics and how they affect someone daily, not only in life but also in the workplace and within the family core.

What are values, people say they are taught as a child and grow from people we come in contact with, whether it is the pastor at a church or a best friend for twenty years. Values are a set of beliefs and ideals, which form assessments of worthiness. Values are socially specific; they derive from the concepts that we use to legitimize society. To take values seriously implies far more than the liberal process of presenting different points of view. Although my values may be slightly different, our society’s core values have trickled down through the generations. Values are an inner core of yourself and that is what makes each individual unique. Values are an essential part of your character makeup and are also based on and how people perceive you. There are clear distinctions between values, which are seen to be permanent and important to society, and attitudes, which are fleeting, and unstable. Whereas people’s attitudes may often change, society depends on stable values. Values are what an individual believes and most people do have good habits to achieving their total belief in his or her values.

“Ethics are the study of the principles relating to right and wrong conduct.” Taking this a step further, ethics as a philosophy is usually broken down into three basic subdivisions, normative ethics, metaethics is concerned with the nature of ethical judgments and theories. Applied ethics consists of the application of normative ethical theories to practical moral problems. Encyclopedia Britannica (2010, March).

Normative ethics are fundamentals, basically how do I act, how...