This chapter begins with the question ‘What is ethics?’ It is not just a list of prohibitions, but rather a reflection on what we consider to be good or bad. It involves an evaluative and disciplined study of what we regard as morally good and what we see as morally bad. This is required if we are to decide how to act. Moral judgements, it will be shown in this chapter, are not simply based on what we think, but on ethical theories. There are two kinds of ethical theories: meta-ethical theories and normative ethical theories. The former are about the kinds of ways in which we can think about the nature of ethical principles and judgements, such as whether they are conventional or universal. Normative ethical theories provide a framework of moral principles that can help us decide whether or not an action is morally right.
Introduction: What is ethics?
Ethics, as it is commonly understood, is connected with various bans against wrong-doing – particularly in business or in the professions. In people’s private lives, it is seen as demanding that, as far as possible, the actions someone chooses to perform have minimal effect on others around them – in some sense, that what people do is morally right. According to such a view, ethics is a means of regulating human behaviour, and so acts as a constraint on human action. This is, in fact, a very simplistic understanding of ethics. Ethics is not about any of the following:
prohibitions concerned with sex
ideal systems, such as codes of behaviour, which are all very noble in theory, but no good in practice
something intelligible only in the context of religion, or
personal likes and dislikes.
In other words, it is neither relative to a particular time, culture or place, nor is it merely the expression of subjective wants and desires (Singer, 2011).