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Ethics

Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the inquiry into how one ought to live and act — what is good, what is right, what is owed. It divides by altitude. Normative ethics asks the first-order question directly: which actions are right, which traits good, what makes them so. Metaethics steps back and asks what the first-order question is about — whether moral claims state facts, whether those facts exist, how they could be known, what makes a moral utterance true or even truth-apt. Applied ethics takes the first-order theories into particular domains — medicine, war, the environment — where the abstractions meet cases.

The page is weighted toward metaethics, because that is where the most basic disagreement lives — not over which acts are wrong but over what wrongness is. The normative theories below are real and contested, but their depth is carried by the thinkers who built them and the encyclopedia entries that treat them in full; here they are mapped, not re-walked.

Normative ethics — the first-order theories

Three families divide the first-order ground, each taking a different feature of the moral situation as primary.

Consequentialism locates rightness in outcomes: an act is right if its consequences are at least as good as any alternative’s. Its dominant form is utilitarianism — Jeremy Bentham’s calculus of pleasure and pain, John Stuart Mill’s refinement into qualities of happiness, Henry Sidgwick’s rigorous systematization, and in the present Peter Singer’s extension to animals and distant need. The standing objections are the demandingness it imposes — every spare resource owed to the greater good — and its willingness, in principle, to sacrifice the individual for the aggregate.

Deontology locates rightness in duty and constraint, independent of outcome: some acts are forbidden, some required, whatever the consequences. Kant is its centre — the categorical imperative, the demand that one act only on a maxim one could will as universal law, the treatment of persons as ends and never merely as means. W. D. Ross loosened it into a plurality of prima facie duties that can conflict and must be weighed; T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism reads wrongness as what no one could reasonably reject, and John Rawls built a theory of justice on the priority of the right over the good. The standing objection is that nothing grounds the duties once their justification is cut from consequences — and that rigid constraint can require disaster.

Virtue ethics takes neither act nor consequence but character as primary: the right act is what a person of good character would do, and the aim of ethics is a flourishing human life. Aristotle is the source — virtue as a mean, practical wisdom (phronesis) as the capacity to judge the particular case, eudaimonia as the end. The tradition was dormant under the modern theories until Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 “Modern Moral Philosophy” reopened it; Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Martha Nussbaum carried it into the present, several of them grounding virtue in facts about the human form of life. The standing objection is that it offers no decision procedure — “do what the virtuous person would do” tells the unsure agent little.

These three are the textbook division; the live work crosses it constantly, and several of the figures above belong to more than one column.

Metaethics — what a moral claim is

Beneath the question of what to do sits the harder one: when someone says an act is wrong, what are they doing — describing a fact, expressing a feeling, applying a rule? The field’s deepest fault line is realism against anti-realism: whether there are moral facts that hold independently of what anyone thinks, feels, or practises.

Realism says there are. It splits over what kind of fact. G. E. Moore’s non-naturalism holds goodness to be a simple, non-natural property known by intuition — his open-question argument (for any natural property, one can still sensibly ask “but is it good?”) is meant to show goodness cannot be identical to any natural fact. Naturalist realism — the Cornell school, Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, Nicholas Sturgeon — holds instead that moral facts are natural facts, about human flourishing and the like, discoverable much as the facts of any science are. The deepest such tradition is natural law, running from Aquinas to John Finnis, which derives binding norms from the structure of human nature itself.

Error theory agrees with the realist that moral claims purport to state objective facts — and adds that there are no such facts, so the claims are systematically false. J. L. Mackie’s argument from queerness (objective values would be metaphysically and epistemically unlike anything else we know) and from relativity (the sheer spread of moral codes is better explained by invention than by discovery) is its classic statement.

Non-cognitivism denies the shared premise: moral utterances do not state facts at all, truly or falsely — they express something. A. J. Ayer’s emotivism made “wrong” a voicing of disapproval; R. M. Hare’s prescriptivism made it a universalizable command. The sophisticated heirs are Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism — which starts from expressed attitudes and then earns back the realist-sounding talk of moral truth and moral knowledge from inside the practice — and Allan Gibbard’s norm-expressivism, where to call an act wrong is to express acceptance of a norm forbidding it. The standing obstacle for all of them is the Frege–Geach problem: if “wrong” only expresses an attitude, what does it mean inside an unasserted clause, as in “if lying is wrong, then…”?

Constructivism routes around the realism question: moral truths are neither found nor merely expressed but constructed by a procedure of reason or agreement, and are objective relative to that procedure. Christine Korsgaard’s Kantian version grounds obligation in the reflective structure of rational agency; Rawls’s constructivism builds principles of justice from the choices of parties behind a veil of ignorance.

Relativism holds that moral truth is relative to a culture or framework, with no neutral standpoint above them to adjudicate. Gilbert Harman gave it a semantic form — “ought” judgements are implicitly indexed to an agreement the speaker shares. It is sharply distinguished from descriptive relativism (the uncontested empirical fact that codes differ) and from contextualism, and it draws the field’s most familiar objections: the self-refutation charge (is relativism itself only relatively true?), and the difficulty of cross-cultural criticism (if right is right-for-a-culture, what condemns another culture’s slavery?). David Wong’s pluralistic relativism answers the second by admitting universal constraints on which moralities are admissible, while keeping a genuine plurality above that floor — closer to value pluralism than to the anything-goes version the objections target.

The form-of-life line rejects the terms of the whole debate. Descending from the later Wittgenstein — ethics as embedded in practices and forms of life, agreement in judgement as the bedrock that makes moral language possible at all — and gathered by Anscombe’s attack on the very idea of “moral obligation” cut loose from a lawgiver, it runs through Bernard Williams’s critique of “morality, the peculiar institution” (the modern system of obligation that crowds out the thicker ethical concepts a life actually runs on) and Cora Diamond’s attention to the ethical force of the particular. Its persistent worry, pressed from outside, is whether grounding ethics in a shared way of life can avoid sliding into relativism — a worry its naturalist wing (Foot, Hursthouse) answers by anchoring goodness in facts about human nature, the way the health of any living thing is fixed by what that creature needs to flourish.

The field’s own arguments

The divisions above are not settled positions in a finished map; they are live fronts. The realism–anti-realism line is the deepest, but several others cut across it. Whether metaethics is prior to normative ethics is itself disputed — Anscombe and the virtue revival ran the first-order inquiry without waiting on the metaethical one, reversing the usual priority. The is–ought gap Hume marked — that no “ought” follows from “is” alone — still sorts the field, with the sentimentalist tradition (Hutcheson, Adam Smith) crossing it through feeling, naturalists denying it is a gap, and expressivists embracing it. The status of moral intuitions — whether the gut judgements that theories are tested against are evidence or merely conditioning — has been reopened by empirical moral psychology, which presses on the armchair from a third side.

Where the field’s edge runs

Ethics does not close cleanly. At its metaethical end it runs into general metaphysics and epistemology — the questions about properties, facts, reduction, and knowledge that moral realism shares with every other realism, so that a dispute that began about goodness becomes a dispute about what a property is. At its normative end it runs into political philosophy: justice, rights, authority, and the duties owed across borders sit on a line where it is genuinely unclear whether the questions belong to ethics widened to the collective or to a discipline of its own. And along a third edge it meets moral psychology and the empirical study of judgement, which keeps asking whether facts about how people actually reason can constrain what they ought to do — the is–ought gap returning as a question about ethics’ own method. These are the field’s boundaries: not where it fails, but where it stops being only ethics.