User:Serene/EthicsSandbox

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness. Morality or ethics is the field of philosophy concerned with right and wrong or good and bad. It aims to answer questions like "What sort of person should I be?" and "How should I act in this situation?". People consider what is right and what is wrong to be innate and second-nature, and to a degree this is true because evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology indicate that we have evolved certain behaviours, and these behaviours (in a very circular way) determine what we think of as moral.

Morality can also refer to:
 * The rules of proper conduct within a group or organization: business ethics, medical ethics, etc. In theory, these rules are created in order to ensure that people are treated fairly. In actual practice, however, these rules have very little to do with acting "properly," and everything to do with avoiding lawsuits.
 * A (not necessarily logical) system or collection of principles, such as one's personal ethics or the famed "protestant work ethic".

Ethics versus morality
In English, the word ethics is usually synonymous with the word morality, and in most cases the two terms can be used interchangeably. However, there are some instances in which an important distinction exists:


 * In philosophy, some ethical theorists argue that morality applies to principle or rule-based systems such as Kant's, and ethics applies to practical or virtue-based systems such as Aristotle's.
 * In common usage, some people prefer to make an "internal/external" distinction, or associate ethics with ideas such as fairness and legality while restricting morality to questions of good and evil. For example, most companies have rules in place regarding the "ethical" use of corporate email accounts &mdash; but there is generally no question of good or evil involved (regardless of how much spam they send), so we usually don't talk about "immoral" use of email.

This article will treat the terms as synonymous.

Branches of ethics
In philosophy, most of the work in ethics falls into two categories: normative ethics and applied ethics. However, there are other branches worth noting.

Normative ethics
Normative ethics is the field of ethics that explores what should be considered right and wrong. In other words, when a philosopher asks, "How should we live our lives?" or "What is the morally right way to act in this situation?", she is engaging in normative ethics. Generally speaking, if a philosopher proposes an ethical code, rule, or principle (such as Kant's categorical imperative), it is an example of normative ethics.

Ethical theories are most often described according to several broad categories defined by what gives the theory its ethical force.


 * Deontology claims that moral behavior is determined by a rule or set of rules such as the Ten Commandments, the Social contract, or Natural law.
 * Consequentialism claims that moral behavior is determined by outcomes such as whether an action leads to the most happiness for the greatest number of people, or whether it is the best outcome for one's self.
 * Virtue Ethics claims that moral behavior is determined by the virtues, that is, the inner traits or characteristics (e.g. courage, temperance, prudence, etc.) that a person embodies.

While these three are the largest (and broadest) categories, they are by no means inclusive of all ethical theories. More recently (that is, within the last century or two, which is how philosophers define recent), several new approaches, including Pragmatic Ethics, Feminist Ethics, Role Ethics, and Care Ethics, have attempted to reframe or reorganize ethical investigations.

Applied ethics
Applied ethics examines ethical concerns in various aspects of human activity. Examples include:
 * Bioethics &mdash; concerned with issues of health science and biology, such as abortion, cloning, and euthanasia.
 * Business ethics &mdash; concerned with issues that occur in business practice, such as privacy, exploitation of labor, and whistleblowing.
 * Environmental ethics &mdash; concerned with human attitudes towards the environment, such as animal rights, conservation, and climate change.
 * Ethics of science and technology &mdash; concerned with issues such as artificial intelligence, conduct of research, or the use and spread of information.

Although distinguished from normative ethics, applied ethics is also a normative discipline.

Descriptive ethics
Descriptive ethics is the study of people's moral beliefs, that is, what things people believe are right and wrong. As such, it is more of a social science than a branch of philosophy, and scholars in fields that deal with human development (such as evolutionary biology or sociology) may use descriptive ethics to study the development of moral ideas. An early example of descriptive ethics would be Auguste Comte's Course on Positive Philosophy, which describes humanity's development in three stages, the "theological", the "metaphysical", and the "positive," with transitions from each stage to the next being accompanied by corresponding changes in moral beliefs. Modern descriptive ethics is much more empirical.

Metaethics
Metaethics is a branch of study that focuses on the presuppositions of ethical theory: Are there objective moral facts? Are moral rules culturally relative? Notable metaethical positions include:
 * Moral realism &mdash; the stance that there are moral facts. Often described as also including commitments to the objectivity or mind-independence of moral facts.
 * Moral relativism &mdash; the stance that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some person or group of people.
 * Moral error theory &mdash; the idea that all moral statements are false
 * Non-cognitivism &mdash; the stance that moral judgements do not express beliefs at all. Prominent non-cognitivist proposals have included that moral judgments are expressions of emotions (emotivism) and that moral judgments are imperatives (prescriptivism).

Realism
Moral realism is, minimally, the position that some moral statements are true. Realism is frequently taken to additionally involve the mind-independence of these facts, meaning that they are independent of human belief or practice. Realism is usually taken to be opposed to metaethical relativism, as well as to error theory, non-cognitivism, and various forms of moral skepticism; these positions are grouped together under the heading of anti-realism. As of 2020, moral realism is the predominant position among ethicists, as well as among philosophers generally.

People generally hold realist positions prior to engagement with ethical theory. Partly for this reason, defenses of realism usually center on refutation of arguments for anti-realism, rather than provision of additional independent reasons to endorse realism. Popular anti-realist arguments often center on the apparent prominence of moral disagreement or on the strangeness of normative moral facts.

Relativism
Metaethical moral relativism holds that moral judgments are always indexical &mdash; ‘X is wrong’ means that X is wrong for S, where S is some person or group of people. Relativism contrasts against absolutism, but is fundamentally realist, since it does not deny that there are moral facts. It need not even deny that these facts are mind-independent, and so is compatible even with strengthened formulations of realism.

Metaethical relativism should not be confused with descriptive relativism, which is an empirical position holding that the ethical norms and values people in fact hold differ across cultures or individuals. A descriptive relativist could hold that some (or all) people are mistaken about norms and values, and should hold to norms or values other than those they actually do.

Relativism also should not be taken to entail tolerance. Tolerance is itself a value, so the claim ‘tolerance is good’ is analyzed, on a relativistic account, as ‘tolerance is good for S’, for some persons(s) S. To maintain that tolerance is good for everybody, irrespective of circumstance, is to take an absolutist position.