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.

—Immanuel Kant

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 — 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 — concerned with issues of health science and biology, such as abortion, cloning, and euthanasia.
• Business ethics — concerned with issues that occur in business practice, such as privacy, exploitation of labor, and whistleblowing.
• Environmental ethics — concerned with human attitudes towards the environment, such as animal rights, conservation, and climate change.
• Ethics of science and technology — 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? While the terminology is not completely settled, notable metaethical positions include:

• Moral realism — the position that there are moral facts. Often described as also including commitments to the objectivity or mind-independence of moral facts.
• Moral relativism — the stance that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some person or group of people.
• Moral error theory — the position that all moral statements are false
• Non-cognitivism — 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 they 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 often taken to be opposed to relativism, as well as to error theory, non-cognitivism, and various forms of moral skepticism, all of which 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 targeted for critique 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 — ‘X is wrong’ means that X is wrong for some person or group of people. Although this position is compatible with the existence of moral facts, its denial of mind-independence leads it to be treated by many as anti-realist. Some philosophers instead treat is as realist, and contrast it instead against absolutism.

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 some person or group of people'. To maintain that tolerance is good for everybody, irrespective of circumstance, is to take an absolutist position.

Anti-realism

Anti-realism is a broad collection of positions that have in common the denial that any moral judgements are true. Error theorists hold that moral judgements are committed to certain moral properties, like rightness, goodness, evil, etc., that don't exist. Consequently, all such judgements are false. Contrarily, non-cognitivists deny that moral judgements have truth values. Rather than judgements about truth or falsehood, moral judgements are thought by non-cognitivists to be expressions of some other attitude. Non-cognitivist theories may be categorized based on the attitude held to be expressed, with prominent theories including that moral judgements are expressions of emotions about the moral issue and that they are imperatives, urging the listener to behave in a certain way.

Normative Theories

Utilitarianism

The utilitarian school of thought has its roots in Bentham's moral thought, and an influential version of the theory was developed by John Stuart Mill, who advocated for a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Utilitarians are committed to consequentialism, the theory that the moral rightness of an action is a function of its consequences. The theory is distinguished from other consequentialist theories by its commitment to gauging consequences by their "utility," an abstract measure of their impact on people. Bentham's theory identified utility with increase of pleasure and reduction of pain, but subsequent theorists have often argued that other consequences are valuable. There is also dispute among utilitarians about the appropriate characterization of right and wrong actions. The "classical" theory is act utilitarianism, which evaluates the value of acts individually and independently. Rule utilitarianism holds that morally right actions are those that accord with a set of general rules that maximize overall utility when gauged against alternative rules. Finally, character utilitarianism holds that the morally right actions are those that would be performed by a person with the character traits that tend, more than the alternatives, to produce maximum utility.

While a number of serious objections have been raised against utilitarianism, some popular objections are rather weak. A common line of attack is that the utility of actions is difficult to evaluate with any kind of precision. However, precision is frequently unnecessary, since we only need to know which actions are best, not exactly how much better they are. 1000 is a much larger number than 1; even if we're off by 50% for both numbers, in the worst possible way for us, we're still looking at 500 vs. 2, which remains a clear-cut case. If one action is orders of magnitude better than another, we don't need to know more to decide between them.

A common misconception is that in maximizing utility, it's the utility that we're after. To the contrary, what we want are the real consequences of our actions; utility is merely a formalism for gauging how desirable these consequences are. My donating blood may give 10 utils, but I don't donate blood because it gives 10 utils; I give blood because it may help somebody in medical need.