Introduction to Ethics

Christopher L. Holland
christopher.holland@slu.edu

Saint Louis University

April 24, 2025

The Domain and Purpose of Morality

The Domain Morality

  • Actions: right, wrong, obligatory, permissible
  • Consequences: good, bad, indifferent
  • Character: virtuous, vicious
  • Motive: good will, ill will

The Purpose of Morality

  • To promote the survival of society
  • To resolve conflicts of interest justly
  • To ameliorate human suffering
  • To promote human flourishing
  • To assign responsibility, praise, and blame to actions

Three Levels of Ethics

  1. Metaethics
  2. Normative Ethics
  3. Applied/Practical Ethics

In this course we will focus on metethics and normative ethics.

Metaethics

Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.

   – Sayre-McCord (2023)

For example:

  • Are there moral facts?
  • If so, can we know them?
  • What does “good” mean?

Normative Ethics

The branch of ethics concerned with what makes an action good or bad, right or wrong.

Three major traditions:

  1. Virtue Ethics
  2. Consequentialism
  3. Deontology

Applied Ethics

Sometimes referred to as “special ethics.” Applied ethics extends normative ethics to specific domains of human life. For example:

  • Medical ethics
  • Business ethics
  • Technology ethics
  • Environmental ethics

Metaethics

Metaethics

In this class we will look at two metaethical questions.

  • Today: Are there objective moral truths? The Issue of Moral Relativism.
  • Next week: What is the relationship between God and morality? The Euthyphro Dilemma

The Cultural Differences Argument

The cultural differences argument against objective moral truths.

1.
If people’s moral judgments differ between cultures, then moral standards are relative to culture (there are no objective moral truths).
2.
People’s moral judgments do in fact differ between cultures.
∴ 3.
So, moral standards are relative to culture (cultural relativism).

PROBLEM: Premise 1 moves from what people believe to what is actually the case. Does it really follow from the mere fact that people disagree that there is no objective truth on the matter? (See Rachels 2011.)

Problems with Cultural Relativism

If morality is merely a social construct (cultural relativism) then:

  • We can no longer say that the customs of other societies are morally inferior to our own.
  • We could decide whether an action is right or wrong just by consulting the standards of our society.
  • The ideas of moral progress and social reform are called into doubt.

Normative Ethics

Dividing Normative Ethics in Two

  • Ethics of Character (pre-modern)
    • Virtue ethics
  • Ethics of Conduct (modern)
    • Consequentialism
    • Deontology

Ethics of Character

Major figures: Plato, Aristotle, Confucius

Moral questions are focused on:

  • Excellence
  • Virtue and Vice
  • Shaping one’s character

Ethics of Conduct

Major figures: Bentham, Mill, and Kant

Moral questions are focused on justice and impartiality:

  • prioritizes obligation and moral acceptability/unacceptability
  • virtues play a secondary role

Diagram of deontic moral concepts

Here the important point is the contrast between the two ways of framing ethics—the premoderns favoring personal virtue, the moderns favoring impartial justice—and different ways of conceiving impartiality in modern philosophy.

   – Rehg (2017, sec. 1.2)

Sources

Pojman, Louis P. 2006. Philosophy: The Pursuit of Wisdom. 5th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Rachels, James. 2011. “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism.” In Ethics: History, Theory, and Contemporary Issues, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Peter Markie, 5th ed., 747–54. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rehg, William. 2017. Cogent Cyberethics. Unpublished manuscript.
Sayre-McCord, Geoff. 2023. “Metaethics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Spring 2023. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/metaethics/.