The public understands very well what ethics means. More than 86 percent of all people interviewed associated ethics with standards and rules of conduct morals, right and wrong, values, and honesty. People immediately understand that although ethics may appear in the headlines, the story told is about the lack of ethics - the doing of wrong as opposed to right. Perhaps Dr. Albert Schweitzer's definition of ethics will satisfy both the philosopher and the practitioner. We feel an obligation to consider not only our own personal well-being, but also that of others and of human society as a whole.
Ethics is our way of being human.
If early man had not identified his own welfare with that of others, he could not have survived and developed. Ethical behavior recognizes and rests within a shared interest. On a practical level this shared interest effects an ordering of society's economic means by which the individual can pursue his own ends. It is the recognition and personal acceptance of this basic order that we call ethical behavior. Behavior becomes unethical when it favors a special interest out of proportion to and without consideration for the interests of society as a whole.