Ethics/ Morality refers to that dimension of human existence whereby man confronts or finds himself, an ideal vision of man,

, or an ideal state and goal of his existence which he finds himself oriented toward. The ideal vision thus constitutes for him an exigency, a demand to action in accord with the ideal vision and goal. By the same token, this ideal vision of man constitutes a fundamental norm in relation to which his life and actions are judged to be right or wrong, good or bad. Right and wrong mean literally being straight or not, in line with, in conformity or not, with the norm. Good and bad are often as equivalents of right or wrong. However, in more precise language, right and wrong refer specifically to that which morally binding or obligatory. Thus the right action is that which we ought to do or ought to have done, the wrong action that which we ought to refrain from or ought to have refrained from doing. The most common manifestation of morality lies in the judgments we all make regarding the goodness or badness of certain acts. Morality or man as moral being is properly speaking, action. Action is the moving of oneself and taking concrete means in view of the goal or end, which is not yet but which somehow ought to be. Hence, morality, essentially, is not a set of rules and prohibitions to limit man. First and foremost, morality is action, the doing and the realizing of what man ought to be. It is true that this action cannot be purely arbitrary <chance, unpredictable, accidental> or blind, and that for it to be truly moral, it must somehow be valid action. It must be justifiable, reasoned and done in the light of truth. It is not something that one possesses for it s own sake or something that one possesses whether one acts or not. It is rather a kind of lived truth, a sort of life that goes ahead of itself. It is a kind of knowledge which is not in full possession of itself, but somehow comes only with mans orientation and tendency toward this future end. Hence, the man who is usually looked upon as a morally good man is not necessarily one who has expert knowledge about things, but one who expectedly acts with firmness and constancy (faithfulness/ reliability) according to some kind of lived sense of humanity. It is the lived sense of what man must be, which the ancients called practical wisdom. Man has will and freedom. As a person, man has the power to be the origin and to be the self-initiating source of his action. His actions are to a certain extent his own. They are within his control and he is responsible for them. Human action can only take place within the context of the concrete embodied individual and the circumstances of the world. Viewed in the concrete, human action means man choosing a concrete goal among alternatives made possible by the situation. In morality, therefore, freedom means basically freedom of action. This more precisely means, first, freedom of choice of the means, secondly, freedom of choice of intermediate goals and thirdly, freedom to follow or not mans necessary ultimate end, which whether he chooses it or not, remains his ultimate end to which he is necessarily oriented. In the third sense, freedom means not so much the completely

free option to take up or leave the end, for there is no other ultimate end, but the freedom of man ultimately to determine himself to be truly man or not. Human acts are voluntary acts, acts that man knowingly and willingly does. They are acts he does freely and for which he is responsible. On the other hand, acts of man are acts of man proceeding from man, but due to lack of knowledge or lack of consent and control, they are involuntary acts. They are not properly speaking human acts, and thus are not imputable to man. Because of the moral dimension or the moral structure of human existence, each individual and each human community has a concept of a common humanity which shares a common dignity by virtue of a common moral end and a common moral norm of good and bad. In moral experience, therefore, man invariably sees himself together with his fellow human beings as oriented to one common end and subject to one common, universal norm. The universal norm must be applied in the context of the individuals particular, concrete situation. In moral experience, then, man experiences himself or herself as being one among many in a community of all human persons. For this reason, equality and justice are the direct corollaries of moral experience. The good has an imperative or binding demand on man so that his being is an ought-to-be, and an ought-to-act in view of the end or the good. Hence, in moral experience, man experiences himself somehow necessarily bound and necessarily oriented to this final end, in view of which he ought to act. This sense of being bound or required, beyond mere inclination end or the good is precisely what is meant by moral obligation. Obligation, in general, means the state of being bound or required to do or not do something. Thomas Aquinas used the term conscience to signify the act of intellectual judgment by which we apply the general principles of morality to the particular situation. He also had the idea of a deep bond which necessarily binds and orients man to God as his final end, regardless of whether man consents and conforms to this fundamental relationship or not.