introduction

CHAPTER ONE UNDERSTANDING CIVICS AND ETHICS
Introduction
This is the first chapter that sets out the required definitions, similarities between civics and ethics, outlines aim and goals of the study of the subject, and finally points out competences of good citizens. Civics and Ethical studies by its very nature is a multi-disciplinary field of study. Civics as part of Social Science discipline is more dependent on Political Science, Law, Economics, Sociology and others while Ethics relies more on Philosophy. Because, philosophy as part of Social Science deals about Metaphysics, Epistemology, Religion, Aesthetics, Ethics and others. Civics and Ethics are understood and analyzed in different countries differently depending on the distinct realities and challenges of states and societies. Given this, civics and ethics are separate fields of academic study in the social sciences dealing with citizenship and morality respectively.
Civics and Ethics are un independent subject but integrated.
1.1. Civics, Citizenship, Ethics and Morality: Definition
 Civics is termed as a branch of human knowledge or learning that deals with civil affairs. It deals with the rights, and responsibilities of citizens. It is the study of institutions, habits and sprits by means of which citizens may fulfil their duties and receive their benefits of membership in political community/state. Studies the international socio economic and political conditions. It studies the purpose of government and the nature of law. The intensive(complex, wide) studies and understanding of political institutions. More specifically, civics is devoted to the study of the legal and political rules and values governing the relations between the individual and the state.
 Ethics is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality. Ethics is a branch of philosophy that studies about the nature of moral value. Ethics provides an important observation in evaluation about moral principle and thinking. Etymologically, the word ethics came from early Greek word ‘ethos’ means habitual/customary conduct or characteristics of way of acting and living. It includes cultural mannerism, religious, political and social aspirations of a group of people. Ethics is exclusively deals with morality: how to choose good and evil and how to help others… In other words ethics questions or evaluates moral principles and thinking and provides logical and meaningful answers to them. Thus, ethics can be defined as systematic general science of right and wrong conduct/the study of morality.
 Morality refers to the actual pattern of conducts, manner, character and proper behaviour of individuals and the direct working rules of moral actions in a society. It is a sense of behavioural conduct that differentiates intentions, decisions and actions between those that are good or bad, right or wrong, virtue or vice in human social settings. In short it defined the doctrine of moral duties or quality of actions as estimated by a standard of right and wrong. Its major objective is to make the world a better place by producing good tendencies.
 Citizenship comes from the word ‘citizen’ that refers to people of a certain nation or people who live in a certain state. Citizen is a person who has a status of legal membership for the state. Thus citizens are legal members of a state with rights to enjoy and responsibilities to shoulder. All in all, citizenship is a full membership in a state or it is a relation between an individual and the state which is defined by the law of the state with rights and corresponding duties and responsibilities.
Based on the above descriptions it will be easier to identify the basic features of both civics and ethics. Civics/citizenship and ethics/morality are interrelated terminologies and sometimes by default people use them interchangeably to mean one instead of the other. However, living aside their commonalities, conceptually they are different disciplines with their own underlined tenets and variances. Generally speaking, Civics and Ethics are separate fields of academic study in the social sciences dealing with citizenship and morality respectively. Systematized as integrated and unified field of study however, Civics and Ethics is devoted to the study of how the legal, political, traditional, moral and cultural rules and values govern the relations among the individual and the state, the individual citizen and other individuals, the individual and other social groups and one social group with the other. This definition shows that Civics and Ethics as an integrated academic field of study may mean more or less similar things in different states and societies. In other words, there is a strong tendency in the academic world to draw similar subject as well as scope of study as far as Civics and Ethics is concerned. In fact in the next section details the commonalities and differences between and among those concepts.

1.2. Similarities and Differences of Civics and Ethics
1.2.1. Similarities of Civics and Ethics
Generally speaking, civics studies the political and legal aspect of the life of an individual citizen whereas ethics is focused with the study of the cultural aspect of his/her life. Although strictly speaking civics and ethics are separate academic fields of study they however share certain commonalities. The followings are some examples of the common features between civics (citizenship) and ethics (morality).

A. The issue of membership
Membership to a certain groupings is the very essence of both citizenship and morality. In the absence of the concept of membership both lose their fundamental meanings and status as subject matters to be studied. In the study of citizenship, membership is meant that of individual citizen to a political and legal community of the highest order(the state) whereas in morality study it largely denotes to that of a cultural community tied up by common moral and value bonds whether there is government or not. In other words, Citizenship basically needs two parties and their relations for its existence under minimum conditions—the state and the individual citizen, while morality needs the relation between the individual and the larger social group as well as the state directly and indirectly as a rule maker and protector. As such, civics tends to focus on the vertical and artificial relation of the individual while ethics studies the horizontal and natural relations. Put differently, citizenship needs some kind of political and legal arrangement to determine who is a member of the state and who is not. Similarly, morality is a value arrangement that describes and prescribes the conditions for the individual member to be accepted as a ‘good’ element as judged and rated by the society itself which is the biological and cultural breeding ground of its members. However, under both conditions membership to a certain grouping and community is an established common factor shared by citizenship and morality. There reason is, as Aristotle also holds it, that humanity is destined by its exceptional nature to be a social creature with an inherent duty to tie itself to a political company.
B. The issue of rights and obligations
Human beings are social animals under inherent trend to live together in a social gathering. But this social gathering is not anywhere a haphazard and accidental aggregation of individuals without some kind of systematized organization and common orientation. There are rather certain unavoidable rules and procedures with lists of privileges and concomitant obligations attached to the individual person as a condition of social attachment with the vast social surrounding. For instance, Citizenship entails a set of rights and obligations for individual members thus the violation or respect of which results in some arrangement of punishment or reward by the group as well as the state. Morality on its part is nothing but a list of values standardizing bad and good behaviours and dispositions of the individual by the larger mass or group. Both underscore the fact that the individual person is accountable to two sets of rights and obligations mostly set and protected by social forces out of his control.

C. The issue of institutionalized protection
Both citizenship and morality are founded on institutionalized origin, development, operation, supervision and protection within the community. An institution here signifies a sociological establishment and organization of people formed strictly with a degree of executive right to exercise coercive power on the individual in the name of the community. It bases itself on certain sets of rules and procedures accepted by the majority of the people in the community and practices hierarchic strictures to apply its control over the behaviour of the individual. The institution obtains and maintains its legitimacy to rule over the behaviours of the individual member of the group from majority approval and its capacity to transcend itself across generations. With the major differences in the authority of the institution, it is commonly responsible to protect civic and moral sets of rights and obligations by applying formal and informal supervisory mechanisms over the individual. The state through the government and all agencies under it regulate and administer citizenship on day-to-day basis while such social institutions like the church, family, neighbourhood and others inspect morality and ethical standards more informally. This institutional protection of citizenship and morality helps to make individual relations and actions within the community predictable and subject to proportional rewards and punishments.
D. The issue of interactive duality
Although Citizenship differs from morality in that it is formal, official, predominantly rational, highly authoritative and regular in its operation because it finds its strength from the legitimacy of the government and its formalized authority, both categories of social formulations has a strong tendency to reinforce each other in application which leads to some sort of interactive duality. In other words, the list of rights and duties in citizenship are officially communicated, documented, and guarded by full time public institutions in the name of the wellbeing and peace of the state, the people and the nation. Morality on the other hand, lists recommended prescriptions of good behaviour and denounces a long list of bad actions within the community but it lacks formality, regularity and immediacy unlike citizenship or legal rule. Despite this duality, however, both citizenship and morality reinforce each other as the political community of citizens are at the same time the cultural community of human beings. Most legal rules, restrictions and controls over the behaviours of the citizen get their origin from the moral traditions and thoughts of the people over its individual member. For instance, homicide is as seriously punishable crime by the law of citizenship as it is unacceptable and denounced by the moral rule of cultural community. This implies that most legal-political rules are formalizations of moral standards and derive their justifications for their authoritative application from them. Similarly, moral rules function with a state back for formalization though not all the time. This gives them a dual existence with a high level of positive interaction.

1.2 .2 Differences of Civics and Ethics

As it is briefly discussed in the above subsections civics is basically focused with the issue of citizenship and ethics deals with morality. In other words civics stands for legal matters while ethics confined with morality and moral standards. Based on this general difference let us identify some of specific issues that may differentiate the two. Among others the following are some of the notable aspects of their differences:
 While Law regulates the outward/observable acts of individuals; morality does so to the inner motives (behaviors) of individuals.
 In relative sense, law is more precise and technical than morality. This characteristic feature renders law the relative advantage of being uniformly/universally applicable while morality is subjective and particularistic in application across countries. For example, eating the flesh (meat) of a donkey or a dog is immoral in societies of Ethiopia while it is moral in societies of china or Korea. But, killing a person is illegal relatively in all societies.
 Nature and type of punishments: while violation of law entails in most cases physically/financially painful punishments, violation of moral norms (values) entails psychologically painful ones like social exclusion, stigma, disapproval, etc.
 The kind and nature of actor (s) they employees for sanction/ imposition: i.e. while law is imposed by the state (government institutions) universally to a given society, morality is developed and imposed by the society itself. There might be sanctions behind the rules of morality that are not necessarily applied nor determined in advance by organized machinery (the state).
1.3. Goals of Civics and Ethics
Aims of teaching civics and Ethics Some important aims of teaching civics are given below.
1. Ideal Citizenship
The most important aim of teaching civics is to produce ideal citizens i.e., Ideal citizens are those citizens who are competent and active participant in the process of respecting their right and fulfilling their duties.

2. Producing Citizens with National Pride and Patriotism
No country can progress effectively unless its citizens are soaked in the spirit of patriotism. They should be prepared to sacrifice everything for their motherland. They should also be proud of their cultural heritage and uphold the values of the society.
3. Development of Democratic outlook and Strengthening Democracy
By inculcating the basic principles and virtues of democracy and good governance, the course will help for the creation and development of democratic/participatory political culture in the country.
4. Political Consciousness and social efficiency
The course will serve as an input to raise the political and social awareness of the student. This will in turn brings politically and socially and effective and efficient citizens.
5. Scientific and Rational Outlook
Civics and ethics also help the student to develop rational and scientific methods of understanding their society, county and world at all. By doing so the course will help them to free themselves from stereotype, prejudice and so on.
6. Strengthening National and International Integration
On this case, the course will also serve in strengthen the linkage and awareness of people across country. This includes creating a global citizen that could think globally and act locally.
7. Celebrating diversity
As it is almost impossible to find a homogeneous population across the country, developing a culture of tolerance and accommodation of differences is an essential value for the society. The diversity within the society may arise from religion, ethnicity, culture or language.
The objectives of Civic and Ethics
Different scholars and philosophers have insured the necessity of learning and teaching civic education. For instance, the famous Greek philosopher, Aristotle said that ‘if liberty and equality are chiefly to found in democracy, they will be attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.’ When this is elaborated, it means that the democratic principle of library and equality can be exercised and implemented if and only if there is equal participation of people in the government. Without liberty and equality democracy will not or cannot be implemented. In other words when there is discrimination based on color, sex, language, race, etc, the democratic principle of liberty and equality cannot be realized. Thus, to implement these principles, we need equal participation of citizens.
Another scholar, Benjamin Rush wrote the ‘youth should be educated to watch for the state as if its liberty depends on their vigilance alone.’ What does this mean? These mean that the youth should be educated. In short Civic and ethics has the following basic goals/objectives.
• One of the objectives of civic education is to promote the knowledge and skilled participation of sovereign citizen in the art of deliberation. This includes the study of democracy, the rule of law, all types of citizens’ right, human right, and periodic fair and free elections, pluralism, the principle of democratic government, the activities and values of democratic civil society, etc. The citizens’ state is collectively sovereign. The citizen has the right to change government that fails to protect individual right. Thus, the ultimate goal of civic education is to enable citizens to participate competently and responsibly in the monitoring and informing of public policy, democratic development and protection of citizens’ right. Hence the primary concern of civic education is training of citizen in political and legal self government.
• The other is civic and Ethics promote among citizens’ civic dispositions and commitments of fundamental values and principles required for competent and responsible citizenship.
In general the significance of civic and ethics includes:-
 To make citizen aware about the fundamental rights, freedoms and duties.
 To initiate citizens to participate actively in the political and social activities of the government or state,
 To produce competent and responsible citizens who actively take part in the overall development of the country,
 To develop the culture of democracy and avoid the culture of passivity and apathy,
 To make citizen think rationally and critically.
 To make citizen feel responsible to whatever they do … etc.
1.4. Competence of Good Citizens
Characteristics of a Good Citizen
A good citizen is an individual who:
(i) Believes in equality of opportunity for all people.
(ii) Values, respects and defends basic human rights and privileges guaranteed by our constitution.
(iii) Respects and upholds the law and its various agencies.
(iv) Understands and accepts the democratic principles.
(v) Puts the general welfare above his own welfare.
(vi) Accepts his civic responsibility and discharges them to the best of his capability.
(vii) Realizes the necessary connection of education with democracy.
(viii) Assumes a personal responsibility for the wise use of natural resources
(ix) Attempt to understand the cultures and way of life of others.
(x) Supports all efforts to prevent war, but is always ready to depend his country against tyranny and aggression.
(xi) Cultivates qualities of character and personality that have a high value in his culture.
(xii) Recognizes taxes as payment for community services and pays them promptly.
(xiii) In a responsible family member and assumes his full responsibility for maintaining the civic standards of his neighborhood and community etc
(xiv) In guided by the idea of “Live and Let Live.”