Western Ethics

Overview

Begin with the map. Normative ethics offers theories of right action. Consequentialism judges actions by outcomes, with utilitarianism as its most influential form. Deontology judges actions by duty and principle, with Kant as its most influential form. Virtue ethics judges actions by character, asking what a virtuous person would do, with Aristotle as its classical source and modern revivalists as its contemporary voice. Each family has a characteristic question: consequentialism asks what will happen, deontology asks what duty requires regardless of outcome, and virtue ethics asks what kind of person acts this way. Metaethics asks a different question: what are we doing when we make a moral judgment. Cognitivism says moral judgments express beliefs capable of truth or falsity, whether grounded in natural facts, in non-natural properties, or in divine commands. Non-cognitivism says they express attitudes, emotions, or prescriptions, and are therefore not truth-apt in the ordinary sense. Error theory is a cognitivist position with a sceptical twist: moral judgments purport to state facts but are systematically false because the facts they presuppose do not exist. Applied ethics then takes these foundations to medicine, environment, business, and law, but without the foundations the applied debate collapses into competing intuitions. A useful examination habit is to take one case, such as lying to protect a friend, breaking a promise to save a life, or sacrificing one person to save five, and run it through each theory in turn, noting where they agree, where they diverge, and what each theory must say about the dissenting intuition. The theories are best learned as rivals answering the same case, not as separate chapters to memorise.

Concepts and theories of ethics

Ethics begins with distinctions that prevent confusion. Good is used in several senses: instrumentally good as a means, intrinsically good as an end, morally good as praiseworthy character or action, and good for a person as contributing to wellbeing. Right is narrower than good: an action can be right without being the best imaginable, and a good person can do a wrong act through ignorance. Duty is an obligation that binds regardless of inclination, while virtue is a stable disposition to act well, and value is what makes outcomes worth pursuing. The fact-value distinction, associated with Hume, claims that no ought can be derived from an is by logic alone: descriptions of how things are do not by themselves entail prescriptions about how they ought to be, unless a normative premise is added. Consequentialism in its simplest form says an action is right if it produces the best consequences, where best is defined by a theory of value. Utilitarianism defines best as the greatest happiness, understood as pleasure minus pain or as preference satisfaction, and it sums across all affected beings impartially, counting each person happiness equally. Act utilitarianism applies the test to each action; rule utilitarianism applies it to rules, asking which set of rules, if generally followed, produces the best outcomes, and then judges actions by those rules. Deontology denies that outcomes alone decide: some actions are wrong even when they produce good outcomes, because they violate duty, treat persons as mere means, or break a promise that trust depends on. Kant is the paradigm, but deontology also includes rights theories, where rights act as constraints that cannot be traded off for aggregate benefit, and divine command theories, where rightness is obedience to God, raising the dilemma whether God commands the good because it is good or it is good because God commands it. Virtue ethics, revived as a challenge to both, argues that modern moral philosophy overemphasises rules and outcomes and neglects character, practical wisdom, and the question of what a flourishing life consists in. Aristotle eudaimonia, often translated as flourishing or living well, is activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and virtues are cultivated habits, not innate traits or single decisions. The three families disagree most sharply on moral dilemmas: where utilitarianism may permit harming one to save many if the sum favours it, deontology forbids using a person as a mere means even for a greater sum, and virtue ethics asks whether a person of courage, justice, and compassion would do such a thing and what doing it would do to their character.

Egoism, altruism, relativism

Psychological egoism is a descriptive thesis: every human action is ultimately motivated by self-interest, so apparent altruism is really enlightened self-interest, reputation seeking, or avoidance of guilt. Its evidence is the ease with which self-interested motives can be redescribed: the donor enjoys giving, the hero gains glory, the martyr seeks heaven or fame. Its weakness is that redescription makes it unfalsifiable: if every motive counts as self-interest because the agent wanted to act, then the thesis says nothing testable, and it confuses the fact that an act satisfies the agent desire with the claim that the desire was for the agent own benefit. Ethical egoism is a different thesis, normative rather than descriptive: each person ought to act in their own interest, and others interests count only instrumentally. It faces the problem of conflict: if two people interests clash, ethical egoism gives each the same advice to pursue their own interest, which cannot guide resolution, and it struggles to explain why anyone should accept a theory that licenses others to harm them. Altruism, by contrast, holds that concern for others welfare is a genuine and irreducible motive and a genuine moral reason. Evolutionary and psychological arguments for altruism point to kin care, reciprocal cooperation, and empathy as stable features of human life, not as disguises for selfishness. Cultural relativism claims that moral truth is relative to culture: an action is right if and only if the agent culture approves it, so cross-cultural judgment is illegitimate. Its argument from disagreement notes the wide variation in moral codes and infers that no universal code exists. The reply is that disagreement does not entail relativism: cultures can disagree because they share values but differ in factual beliefs, circumstances, or application, as with different rules about food that share a value of hospitality, and many disagreements are about means rather than ends. Subjectivism makes morality relative to the individual: right means approved by me, which collapses moral argument into reportage of taste and cannot explain moral error, since a person cannot be wrong about their own approval. Moral objectivism holds that some moral claims are true independently of culture or individual approval, whether grounded in reason, human nature, wellbeing, or divine command. The strongest objectivist reply to relativism is the reformer argument: if relativism were true, moral reformers who challenge their culture would always be wrong by definition, yet history treats reformers who opposed slavery or oppression as having been right against their culture, which relativism cannot allow. Relativism also faces a boundary problem: cultures are not sealed units, individuals belong to many overlapping groups, and the theory gives no non-arbitrary way to pick which group verdict counts.

Kant and utilitarianism

Kant moral philosophy starts from the idea that morality must be grounded in reason alone, not in happiness, inclination, or divine command, because only reason is universal and necessary. A good will is the only thing good without qualification: talents, wealth, and even happiness can be misused, but a will that acts from duty is good in itself. Duty is distinguished from action merely in accordance with duty: a shopkeeper who charges fairly only to keep customers acts in accordance with duty but not from duty, and his action lacks moral worth in Kant strict sense, though it is still the right thing to do. The categorical imperative is the test of maxims, the subjective principles on which we act. In its universal law formulation, act only on a maxim you can at the same time will as universal law: a maxim of lying to gain advantage fails because universalised lying destroys the trust that lying exploits, so the liar wills a world where their own lie cannot work. In its humanity formulation, treat humanity, whether in yourself or another, always as an end and never merely as a means: persons have dignity, not price, and may not be used as instruments even for good ends. In its kingdom of ends formulation, act as if legislating for a community of rational agents who are both authors and subjects of the law. Kant duties divide into perfect duties, which admit no exception, like not lying and not killing the innocent, and imperfect duties, which allow latitude in how they are fulfilled, like beneficence and self-improvement. Utilitarianism, developed by Bentham and Mill, starts from the opposite intuition: the right action is the one producing the greatest happiness for the greatest number, where happiness is pleasure and absence of pain for Bentham, and where Mill distinguishes higher intellectual and moral pleasures from lower bodily pleasures, arguing that competent judges prefer the higher even at the cost of quantity. Bentham felicific calculus weighs intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent of pleasures and pains. Mill defends utilitarianism against the charge that it is a doctrine worthy of swine by insisting on quality of pleasures, defends liberty as the condition for experiments in living that discover better pleasures, and defends justice as the most important part of utility, since security of expectation is the ground of all other goods. Standard objections to utilitarianism include that it demands too much, requiring constant calculation and sacrifice of personal projects; that it permits injustice, sacrificing an innocent person if the sum favours it; and that it cannot easily measure or compare happiness across persons. Standard objections to Kant include that perfect duties can conflict with tragic results, as in lying to a murderer at the door, and that the universal law test is empty without substantive assumptions about what counts as a contradiction. Rule utilitarianism is partly an attempt to answer the injustice objection by protecting rights through rules, while Kant defenders reply that a theory that permits using persons as means has already abandoned the dignity that makes morality matter.

Ethical cognitivism and non-cognitivism

Metaethics asks whether moral language states facts. Cognitivism says yes: when someone says stealing is wrong, they express a belief that is true or false. Naturalist cognitivism grounds moral facts in natural facts, such as wellbeing, flourishing, or evolved social cooperation, so moral knowledge is continuous with empirical knowledge. Non-naturalist cognitivism, associated with Moore, holds that goodness is a simple, unanalysable, non-natural property known by intuition, and that any attempt to define good in natural terms commits the naturalistic fallacy: from the fact that something is pleasant or desired, it does not follow that it is good, since the question whether pleasure is good remains open. This open question argument is the core of Moore challenge: for any natural property proposed as the definition of good, it remains intelligible to ask whether that property is good, which shows the definition is incomplete. Intuitionism replies that basic moral truths are self-evident to rational reflection, like axioms in mathematics, though critics ask why intuitions disagree and how they can be checked. Non-cognitivism denies that moral judgments are beliefs at all. Emotivism, associated with Ayer and Stevenson, holds that moral judgments express emotions and attitudes and function to influence others: saying stealing is wrong is like saying boo to stealing, with a persuasive force but no factual content. Its strength is explaining moral disagreement as clashes of attitude and explaining why moral language is action-guiding; its weakness is that moral reasoning looks like reasoning about facts, with inference, consistency, and error, which emotivism struggles to capture, since attitudes do not stand in logical relations the way beliefs do. Prescriptivism, associated with Hare, holds that moral judgments are universal prescriptions: to say stealing is wrong is to prescribe that no one steal in relevantly similar circumstances, including oneself. This preserves reasoning, since prescriptions can be universalised and tested for consistency, and it explains why moral judgments motivate, since prescribing is already a practical commitment. Error theory, associated with Mackie, agrees with cognitivism that moral judgments purport to state objective facts but argues they are all false, because they presuppose objective values built into the fabric of the world, and no such queer entities exist. Mackie argument from relativity notes moral variation, and his argument from queerness notes that objective values would be metaphysically strange and epistemologically mysterious. The contemporary debate continues between realists who defend moral facts, constructivists who ground them in rational agency or idealised agreement, and expressivists who refine non-cognitivism to capture moral reasoning without factual commitment. For examination purposes, the key move is to classify any position correctly: ask first whether it says moral judgments are truth-apt, then whether it says they are true, and only then what grounds them.

Three normative families compared

Metaethical positions compared