Study sheet: Social Science and Ethics

📋 Course Outline

1. Social Science and Its Perspectives
2. Branches of Social Science
3. Ethics Morality and Human Acts
4. Ethics Law Politics and Religion
5. Professional Ethics and Sanctions
6. Philosophy and Social Thought
7. Major Philosophers and Thinkers
8. Ethical Philosophies and Critiques
9. Ethics and Related Sciences
10. Philosophy and Moral Classification

📖 1. Social Science and Its Perspectives

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Social Science : the scientific study of human society, social relationships, individual behavior, groups, institutions, and the ways people live, work, make rules, and think.
• Functional View : the study of how groups manage resources, power, rules, and survival.

📝 Essential Points

• Social science uses listening, observation, and deep description to study phenomena such as prices, jobs, and inflation.

💡 Memory Hook

Social science studies society broadly, whereas its specialized branches study particular dimensions of human life.

📖 2. Branches of Social Science

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Psychology : studies the internal and behavioral patterns, human nature, and behavior of the individual person.
• Political Science : studies government and the state, focusing on power, governance, and political behavior.
• Anthropology : a social science that studies humanity, human societies, biological evolution, language, and cultural traditions from the past to the present.
• Economics : studies wages, labor, production, and the distribution of wealth, including how people use and earn money and resources to meet unlimited wants.

📖 3. Ethics Morality and Human Acts

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Ethics : the practical science of morality that studies human acts with reference to right and wrong and establishes principles of right living.
• Morality : the quality of goodness or badness in a human act.
• Norms of Morality : the standards, criteria, rules, principles, or laws used to determine why human acts are morally right or wrong.
• Human Acts : voluntary actions performed with knowledge and consent that are under a person's control and for which the person is responsible.

💡 Memory Hook

Human acts involve knowledge and consent, whereas acts of man may be involuntary or morally neutral.

📖 4. Ethics Law Politics and Religion

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Law : crystallized ethics that governs external acts and presupposes distinctions between right and wrong and good and bad.

📝 Essential Points

• Politics aims at good government for the temporal welfare of citizens.

• Religion and ethics share these postulates: a Creator, freedom of the human will, immortality, the attainment of humanity's supreme purpose or ultimate end

💡 Memory Hook

Right-and-wrong principles → law, government, religion, and professional conduct.

📖 5. Professional Ethics and Sanctions

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Professional Code of Ethics : a set of behavioral guidelines that members of a profession are required to follow in professional practice.

📝 Essential Points

• Violations of a professional code may result in a fine, payment of investigation costs, reprimand, conditions on membership, suspension, or expulsion.

💡 Memory Hook

Fine → investigation cost → reprimand → conditions → suspension → expulsion.

📖 6. Philosophy and Social Thought

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Philosophy : the study of love and wisdom and the investigation of the meaning and worth of reality through human reason.
• Socratic Method : uses questioning to discover truth and emphasizes self-knowledge and ethical living.

📝 Essential Points

• From 600 BCE to the 1700s, philosophical thinkers examined human existence, morality, knowledge, and the ideal society through reason, observation, logic, and reflection.

💡 Memory Hook

Ancient reflection → political thought → scientific social science.

📖 7. Major Philosophers and Thinkers

📝 Essential Points

• Socrates was born in Athens in 469 B.C.E., established the Socratic method, and is known as the Father of Western Philosophy.

• Plato wrote The Republic, discussed justice and the ideal state, and believed that knowledge comes from reason.

• Aristotle emphasized observation and empirical inquiry, studied politics, ethics, logic, and natural sciences, and developed early ideas about government and social order.

• Auguste Comte, known as the Father of Sociology, introduced Positivism and argued that human society should be studied through scientific methods.

📖 8. Ethical Philosophies and Critiques

★ Must-know

📌 Socrates held that virtue is identical with knowledge, vice is identical with ignorance, and no one commits an evil act knowingly.

• Plato held that people are intrinsically good but may make judgments through irrational parts of the soul, producing moral conflict and evil actions caused by ignorance.

Further detail

• The critique of Socrates argues that a person may possess knowledge yet deliberately commit an evil act to satisfy a hidden motive.

💡 Memory Hook

Socrates identifies evil with ignorance, whereas the critique allows deliberate evil despite knowledge.

📖 9. Ethics and Related Sciences

★ Must-know

• Psychology studies how people behave, whereas ethics studies how people ought to behave and the moral obligations governing conduct.

• Sociology studies social order, interactions, and human relations, whereas ethics studies moral order in society.

• Logic studies right thinking and reasoning, whereas ethics studies right living and moral conduct.

Further detail

📌 Economics studies wages, labor, production, and wealth distribution, whereas ethics concerns the morality of economic activity.

💡 Memory Hook

Psychology studies how people behave, whereas ethics studies how they ought to behave.

📖 10. Philosophy and Moral Classification

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Logic : the conditions under which a conclusion follows from premises and is logically valid when true premises necessarily guarantee a true conclusion.
• Epistemology : knowledge, including its definition, sources, criteria, possible kinds, degree of truth, and relation between the knower and the known object.

★ Must-know

• Theoretical or speculative philosophy studies truths to be known, whereas practical philosophy studies truths to be acted upon.

• Deductive reasoning moves from universal truth to a particular conclusion, whereas inductive reasoning moves from particular cases to universal or general principles.

• Acts of man are natural actions that may be involuntary or only temporarily controlled by the will, whereas human acts are deliberate, knowledgeable, voluntary, and morally assessable.

• Good acts harmonize with right reason, evil acts contradict right reason, and indifferent acts are neither good nor evil in themselves.

Further detail

• Examples of natural involuntary acts include:
  • blinking
  • metabolism
  • perspiration
  • heartbeat

💡 Memory Hook

Theoretical philosophy → practical philosophy → logic and moral classification of acts.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Selected Social Science Branches

Branch	Main subject	Distinct focus
Psychology	Individual person	Internal and behavioral patterns
Sociology	Society	Social order and human relations
Political science	Government and state	Power and governance
Economics	Resources and wealth	Wages, labor, production, and distribution
Anthropology	Humanity	Evolution, language, and culture

Types of Human Action

Type	Characteristics	Moral status
Human acts	Knowledge, consent, freedom, and control	Morally assessable
Natural involuntary acts	Performed intuitively or involuntarily	Morally neutral
Natural voluntary acts	Controlled by the will for some period	Not necessarily morally assessable
Indifferent acts	Neither good nor evil in themselves	May change through law or circumstances