Branches of Philosophy

Ethics

Also Known As Moral Philosophy

Ethics

The branch of philosophy concerned with how one ought to live and act, and with what makes an action right or a life good. Three broad families of answer have dominated the Western tradition: virtue ethics, associated with Aristotle, which asks what character traits make a person excellent and treats right action as what a virtuous person would do; deontological ethics, associated with Kant, which grounds rightness in duty and in principles that could be willed as universal law regardless of consequences; and consequentialism, most fully developed as utilitarianism by Bentham and Mill, which judges an action by the balance of good and harm it produces. Ethics also covers metaethical questions about whether moral claims can be true at all, and applied questions about specific practical dilemmas, but the founding question, how should one live, is Socrates' own, asked in nearly every dialogue Plato wrote.

Facts

Disputed

Key Debate

Consequentialism versus deontology, sharpened by the trolley problem: whether the rightness of an action is fixed entirely by its consequences, as consequentialists hold, or by duties and rules that can forbid an act even when it produces the best outcome, as deontologists hold, with trolley cases used to test the two views against shared intuitions. 1

The trolley problem and its variants have been used since Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson to sharpen, without settling, the older dispute between consequentialist and deontological ethics.

Key Debate

Whether morality is discovered or made: the Socratic tradition treats the good as an objective target reason can pursue through examined dialogue, while Nietzsche treats inherited morality as a historically contingent human invention, open to revaluation rather than discovery. 2

A third position denies both horns: J.L. Mackie's error theory holds that ordinary moral discourse commits speakers to objective values and objective prescriptions, but that no such objective moral facts exist at all, so moral claims are not so much discovered, made, or revalued as systematically false; see the attached dissent.

Central Question

How should one live, and what makes an action right or a character good? 1

Key Debate

The is-ought problem: David Hume observed that moral writers slide, unnoticed, from statements of what is the case to statements of what ought to be the case, a transition he found could not be validly made from facts alone, since the distinction of vice and virtue is not perceived by reason or founded merely on the relations of objects; whether any such gap between fact and value can be bridged remains a live question in metaethics. 1

Ethics

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FAQs

What is the is-ought problem, and why does it matter for ethics?

David Hume pointed out that moral writers often slide from statements about what is the case to statements about what ought to be the case without justifying the move, and whether that gap between fact and value can ever be closed is still debated.

David Hume observed that moral writers slide, often unnoticed, from statements of what is the case to statements of what ought to be the case, a transition he argued could not be validly made from facts alone, since the distinction between vice and virtue is not perceived by reason or founded merely on the relations between objects. Whether any such gap between fact and value can be bridged remains a live question in metaethics, and it is one of the reasons some philosophers doubt that ethical conclusions can ever be derived from purely factual premises.

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