Title: Difference between Western and Eastern Ethics | Western vs Eastern Ethics
Headings: Difference between Western and Eastern Ethics
Difference between Western and Eastern Ethics
Content: It helps humans deal with human morality and concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. According to Dr. Richard Paul and Dr. Linda Elder of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, "most people confuse ethics with behaving in accordance with social conventions, religious beliefs and the law", and don't treat ethics as a stand-alone concept. Paul and Elder define ethics as "a set of concepts and principles that guide us in determining what behavior helps or harms sentient creatures". However, culture, social conventions and upbringing has a major impact on ethics and morality. Hence, people from different cultures tend to have different sets of ethics. This is especially evident in ethics of groups of people from the Eastern culture as compared to people from the Western culture. Ethics and morality are not inbuilt, they are taught. We learn moral and aspects of right or wrong from our parents, teachers, novels, films, and television. Watching them, we develop a set idea of what is right and wrong, but mainly of what is acceptable and what is not. The main difference between eastern and western ethics is the fact that Western Ethics is about finding truth, whereas Eastern Ethics are very much about the protocol, and showing of respect.