Woman Holding a Balance | Johannes Vermeer, ca. 1664
Key Terms for this Section
Ethics · Moral Values · General Principles
Moral Agent · Ethical Framework · Appeal to Emotion
1.1 | What is Ethics?
Central Question: What is Ethics?
What is Ethics?
Ethics is the philosophical study of the good.
The terms Morality (Latin-based) and Ethics (Greek-based) will be used interchangeably in this course. Moral or ethical questions are concerned with the way we live, how we treat each other, and what makes life worthwhile. Ethicists ask questions about how to decide on moral praise and blame. They ask us to think about basic human needs and how to fulfill those needs without losing consideration for others. An Ethicist may attempt to answer ethical dilemmas like: Is it wrong to steal to feed your family? Is it right to torture a criminal to save a city? Is it ok to lie to protect someone’s feelings?
How We Often Determine our Values
Our moral values are the principles of conduct we deem morally important.
Our moral values vary across different individuals, cultures, religions, and times. It’s essential to understand that our values are not robust enough to be full-fledged ethical systems (eg. philosophical systems like the Character Ethics, Deontology, or Utilitarianism we’ll study in this course). Rather, our moral values are generally a loose collection of general principles, practical conclusions, and emotional pronouncements we’ve gained throughout our individual life journeys.
Our moral values alone are generally insufficient for answering complex ethical problems or dilemmas.
General Principles (ie. “Bumper Sticker Philosophy”) are simple moral axioms used to justify how we often determine right from wrong. Examples include the Golden Rule, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” “All you need is love,” or “Always look out for Number 1.” While useful in a passing sense, such simple axioms are simply too general to apply to complex moral dilemmas. Should we drop a bomb over a city filled with civilians? All you need is love! What should be the tax rate so that we can live in a safe, modern society? When in Rome, do as the Romans do! Should capital punishment be legal? Always look out for Number 1! Clearly, such simplistic axioms are too general to be an ethical framework, as they aren’t up to the task of navigating complicated ethical questions.
The next justification that we often fall back on to guide our moral choices is practical conclusions. Practical Conclusions are the sensible, trial-and-error heuristics we live by from our life experiences. Why don’t I speed down the highway? Well, I don’t want a ticket! Why don’t I steal a candy bar from the shop? Because I don’t want to deal with the police. But such conclusions, again, are insufficient for dealing with complex ethical dilemmas. Ok, so you don’t want to get a ticket — but what if you have a woman going into labor in the backseat? What if stealing is your only recourse for feeding your family this week? Basing ethical decisions on practical conclusions does not present a complete theory, but it is a contributing factor to many theories, as we will discover later in the course.
Perhaps the most frequent, naïve justification for our ethical values are Emotional Pronouncements. Simply put, this is when someone doesn’t act a certain way because “it makes them feel bad” (cf. Subjectivism). It would be mean to fire that waiter! It wouldn’t be nice to charge that family for food! The central problem here is that emotional pronouncements are entirely inconsistent. Emotions change from day to day and from situation to situation. So these also do not offer us a complete, robust theory of ethics.
In addition to these justifications and heuristics, there’s also a big misconception I would like to get out of the way early in the course: asking moral questions is not the same thing as asking what is legal. The question of whether something is “legal” (while it should have an ethical component) is ultimately a political question. That is, a group of politicians decides what is legal or illegal. There have been many times in American history when something was illegal that is now legal (eg. alcohol). Or, when something was legal, that is now very much illegal (eg. slavery). The choice to make these legal or illegal was up to politicians. But politicians don’t decide on morality (could you imagine if they did?!). Because of this, know in advance that when we address questions in this course, mentioning that something is “against the law” will not contribute much weight to your argument.
All of this to say, a proper study of ethics evaluates how we logically justify our actions using reason — not mere recourse to bumper stickers, practicality, feelings, or the law. The moral landscape is far richer and more complicated than all that.
Why Take a College Course on Moral Philosophy
Since the beginning of recorded history, humanity has been wrestling with moral issues.
Today, we are still debating which theories are best for the individual, the marginalized in our society, the political majority, the planet, etc. Broadly speaking, Ethics is concerned with big moral questions like, What is good? What does it mean to live a good life? And why should we be good?
In terms of method, this course is grounded in both theory and practical application. That is to say, we will not only learn about important philosophical ideas (after all, this is a philosophy (PHIL) course), but we will learn how to apply those ideas in the real, lived world. So, first things first, you should take this course because you will be challenged by some of the world’s best moral theories and given real-world examples of how to instantiate those theories in your daily life. Secondly, you will have opportunities to practice presenting coherent and organized philosophical arguments. In brief, you will learn a variety of ways in which one can “frame” ethical questions and responses, and then have the chance to consider and weigh in on ethical dilemmas through those frameworks yourself. Third, one of the overall intended effects of taking a philosophical course is that you become a more engaged and critical thinker. If you are successful in this course, I have little doubt that you will come away from your time here as a better problem-solver and critical thinker.
When you read about the various ethical theories in this course, you should not assume that your instructor is promoting ‘this method’ or ‘that view’ as the way morality works. Rather, the list of frameworks we’ll be covering (many of which contradict each other) represents the way particular ethicists propose morality working. It’s their ideas. In your study, some of these theories will seem more reasonable than others. That’s ok, that’s how a philosophy course is supposed to work! It will be your task to understand each theory (and be as charitable as possible in your understanding) and evaluate its value and acceptability for yourself.
1.2 | The Critical Thinker
Central Question: Why do ethical problems require structured reasoning?
Moral Frameworks & Agents
To answer ethical dilemmas (the complex philosophical problems about how one ought to act), moral philosophers have developed coherent and systematic accounts of how morality works. These accounts are known as Ethical Frameworks, theoretical systems that explain how moral judgments should be made and justified. This course is a survey of competing ethical frameworks (some of which contradict each other), while not serving as an endorsement of any particular view.
Within this survey, the course examines the moral philosophies of thinkers such as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, alongside ethical traditions developed throughout the ancient world in both Eastern and Western contexts. In addition to theoretical analysis, the course includes applications of ethical reasoning to areas including environmental ethics, greed and altruism, workplace ethics, and emerging issues in bioethics and technology.
Across these traditions, our ethical inquiry will center on the roles and responsibilities of moral agents, those who can be held responsible for their actions on moral grounds. On this understanding, non-human animals are not moral agents, nor are very young children, people in comas, or computers (yet?). Moral responsibility presupposes a capacity for reflection, reasoning, and accountability, all of which ethical theories attempt to explain and evaluate in different ways.
Moral Justification
In ordinary moral life, judgments are often made by appealing to intuition, instinct, or emotional response. While emotions play a significant role in human motivation, they are not sufficient to justify moral claims. When an emotional response is offered as decisive proof that an action is right or wrong, the reasoning commits an Appeal to Emotion, the mistake of treating feelings as evidence for the truth of a moral conclusion.
If moral disagreement were settled solely by emotional response, moral reasoning would collapse into incompatible expressions of approval and disapproval. Claims such as “this feels wrong” or “this makes me uncomfortable” offer no shared standard by which competing judgments can be evaluated. In such a context, institutions that rely on reasons — such as legal systems, professional obligations, or contractual agreements — would lack any stable foundation for resolving conflict.
The limitation of emotional justification does not imply that emotions are irrelevant to ethics. Rather, it shows that emotions require interpretation and assessment within a broader rational framework. Ethical reasoning asks not merely how one feels, but whether those feelings can be supported by reasons that others could, in principle, evaluate and contest.
The Three Stages of Critical Thinking
The study of Ethics (and Philosophy more broadly) actively encourages you to become a critical thinker. At a basic level, we can understand Critical Thinking as the ability to solve intellectual problems or challenges in a logical and rigorous manner. I find William Perry’s 3 Stage Model to be useful in appreciating and understanding how one becomes a critical thinker. His stages begin with passive thinking and end with critical thinking. As you progress through the course, try to recognize yourself within these stages and realize that, with effort, you can progress to the final stage of critical thinking.
Garden of Eden. Perry calls passive thinking the “Garden of Eden” stage. In this toddler–like stage, moral questions are generally seen in black and white. Actions and statements are either right or wrong, with little room for compromise or negotiation. Typically, these claims are based on what authorities (eg. parents) unilaterally claim. However, as every teenager knows, authority figures are imperfect, and the world isn’t made of clear-cut, black-and-white situations. Often, moral questions arise out of murky circumstances that require more nuance than simple, blind judgment. Once we make this adolescent realization, Perry says we move into the second stage, where “anything goes.”
Anything Goes. In the Anything Goes stage — typically beginning when we’re teens but remaining with many people throughout their lives — we realize authorities are fallible. We come to decide that if we can’t trust in the authorities’ expertise, then no single point of view is better than any other. If there is no absolute right or wrong given by a perfect authority figure, then we can fall to Relativism or Nihilism (covered in Section 2). At this stage, we generally find that most things are a matter of opinion. But if that’s the case, then there can be no truths to guide society. What follows from this is the kind of thinking that author Isaac Asimov famously opined as “My ignorance is as good as your knowledge.” Meaning, there are no experts. Everyone with a TikTok account and a smartphone can claim whatever they like, and no one’s opinion is any better than anyone else’s. What a scary thought!
Critical Thinking. In the final stage, we understand what it means to think critically when we accede to one simple fact: EXPERTISE EXISTS. As a critical thinker, I’m clever enough to know what I don’t know. I don’t know how to fix an air conditioner. I don’t know how to read hieroglyphics. I don’t know how to coach a basketball team — but there are experts who do! The critical thinker acknowledges that some viewpoints are better and more informed than others because there are compelling reasons supporting their claims. Arguments are better or worse because of the strength of their argument. Critical thinking shows us that we have a responsibility to explore every perspective, evaluate reasons, and develop informed conclusions that help us make sound judgments.
As a critical thinker, you will be able to see that some arguments are better than others because of the logic and reasoning behind them. You will know why you find something amiss, not simply because it’s what your family believes or it’s what you’ve always been told, but because of logical reasoning. It is with this set of skills that you will best acquire the lifelong skills necessary to encounter others with similar training on even footing.
Keep in mind as we proceed that this course isn’t designed to be agreeable. You will read and hear things from the text, your peers, and perhaps your professor that may challenge your preconceptions. That’s not a bad thing. Consider steel at a weapons forge. A blacksmith challenges the integrity of steel repeatedly, beating out impurities and refining it until it is strong enough to withstand the weight of its design. If you surround yourself with others who agree with you, if you never test yourself, your opinions can never be sharpened. Only by understanding your argument and your opponent’s argument can you effectively turn his mind toward the good. This course is meant to be challenging, to make you a better thinker, and maybe even help you become a more ethical person.
This Section: What is Morality?
Next Section: Key Concepts in Ethics