The word "ethics" comes from the Greek word ethos, which means "character." The term now names a core area of philosophy. Depending on one's interests, the study of ethics can be a simple matter of considering how to do the right thing in certain situations--applied ethics. Ethics can be a study of different cultural norms or ideas about how one should behave--descriptive ethics. One might however be more interested in what moral language means. An evolutionary biologist and atheist like Richard Dawkins would have an entirely different opinion of what people mean by good and evil--entirely different from peace activists like the Hindu lawyer Mahatma Gandhi or the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This concern with statements, attitudes and judgments is called meta-ethics. And normative ethics, (sometimes called prescriptive ethics) focuses on whether moral convictions or beliefs are correct.
Since, with one's ethics, (normative and applied), one can affect or direct one's behavior, an ethic is like an intention. Assumed, however, is that human beings have volition or free will. If human beings do not have free will, then they do not have moral responsibility. The counter intuitive idea that they don't has been advocated by the behaviorist B.F. Skinner, for example. And the ramifications are wide spread. One must ask what rationale there would be for justice systems and how the concept of human rights could be anything but nonsense. This debate thus connects to two other core areas of philosophy--epistemology and metaphysics i.e. questions about what we know, questions about free will vs. determinism and questions about God and the mind.
Debate topics relevant to ethics include the following:
Euthanasia
Vivesection
Cloning
Torture (prison is hiding a nuclear bomb)
Should helping other in distress be a legal obligation?
Capital Punishment
What's fair--equality (communism) or meritocracy (capitalism)
Numerous essential questions to ask in an ethics course could be conceived of. The Cushing Academy offers these:
What is Ethics? What does it mean to engage in thoughtful ethical discourse? Where do our moral values come from? Are values universal and unchanging, embedded in the very
fabric of existence, or are they the subjective constructs of human thought, defined and shaped entirely by their cultural and historical context? What is the good life? What is right conduct? Is there an ultimate purpose/meaning to life? What kind of a world do we live in? What kind of a world should we live in? Are we in debt to anyone or anything for the bare fact of our existence? If so, what do we owe, to whom, or to what? And how should we pay? How should we define and pursue justice—is justice a relative or absolute quality? How do we make our political, social, and economic life reflect our deepest values?
Here is another set of essential questions from Lander University:
What is the nature of the life of excellence?, (2) What is the ultimate worth of the goals you seek?, and (3) What specific courses of conduct, in keeping with these goals, will help lead to the life of excellence?
Moral psychology, which commonly focuses on moral development is a field of study that also often over laps with ethics and philosophy of mind especially where philosophers concern themselves with psychological phenomena like guilt and shame. What people will do, does not necessarily conform to what they believe they should do; but the fact they think they should behave a certain way accounts for why they feel guilt or shame over moral shortcomings. Failure to behave as one believes or knows one should is somewhat of a mystery which religions have referred to as sin. Even the Greek philosophers contemplated this condition under the term Akrasia But difficulty behaving ethically can also arise, not so much from a weak will or undisciplined character as, from ethical dilemmas or situations in which there is no good alternative for how to respond or behave.
Intentions, consequence, fact, and consistency are four important words in ethics. When making moral judgments, we judge a person's intentions. We judge the consequences of each other's actions. We suspend our judgment of people until we know the facts about what they have or have not done. And we judge people by how consistent they are i.e. whether they contradict themselves in either what they say or what they do.
phenomenological
norms, normative, normative ethics
value, value judgment
egoism
hedonism
descriptive or comparative ethics
applied ethics
meta-ethics
axiology
utility, utilitarianism.
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