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Summum bonum is a Latin expression meaning the highest or ultimate good, which was introduced by the Roman philosopher Cicero [1] [2] to denote the fundamental principle on which some system of ethics is based — that is, the aim of actions, which, if consistently pursued, will lead to the best possible life.
Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness", "appropriateness" or "rightness". Moral philosophy includes meta-ethics, which studies abstract issues such as moral ontology and moral epistemology, and normative ethics, which studies more concrete systems of moral decision-making such as deontological ethics and consequentialism.
Aristotle's definition of God attributes perfection to this being, and, as a perfect being, it can only contemplate upon perfection and not on imperfection; otherwise perfection would not be one of his attributes. God, according to Aristotle, is in a state of "stasis" untouched by change and imperfection.
According to Aristotle, how to lead a good life is one of the central questions of ethics. [1]Ethics, also called moral philosophy, is the study of moral phenomena. It is one of the main branches of philosophy and investigates the nature of morality and the principles that govern the moral evaluation of conduct, character traits, and institutions.
No morality without God: If all morality is a matter of God's will, then if God does not exist, there is no morality. This is the thought captured in the slogan (often attributed to Dostoevsky) "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Divine command theorists disagree over whether this is a problem for their view or a virtue of their view.
[4] [page needed] According to The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics, religion and morality "are to be defined differently and have no definitional connections with each other. Conceptually and in principle, morality and a religious value system are two distinct kinds of value systems or action guides."
Christian ethics, also referred to as moral theology, was a branch of theology for most of its history. [3]: 15 Becoming a separate field of study, it was separated from theology during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment and, according to Christian ethicist Waldo Beach, for most 21st-century scholars it has become a "discipline of reflection and analysis that lies between ...
Augustine offered the Divine command theory, a theory which proposes that an action's status as morally good is equivalent to whether it is commanded by God. [16] [17] Augustine's theory began by casting ethics as the pursuit of the supreme good, which delivers human happiness, Augustine argued that to achieve this happiness, humans must love objects that are worthy of human love in the ...