Ethics

The big questions

1. What makes a right action right: its consequences, the kind of act it is, or the character it expresses?
2. Why be moral at all, if you could do wrong and never be found out?
3. Are there moral facts, or is morality a matter of feeling, choice or culture?
4. What makes a human life go well?
5. To whom do we owe moral concern: strangers far away, animals, people not yet born?
6. Does morality depend on religion, or can it stand on its own?
7. How can anyone know what is right, and why does knowing it move us to act?

A shopkeeper never overcharges; a child pays the same as anyone else. Immanuel Kant used this tradesman in the Groundwork (1785) and granted that the customers are “honestly served”, yet he denied that the tradesman acted from duty, since “his own advantage required it”, and for Kant only action from duty has moral worth. Most readers feel the force of the verdict and some discomfort with it, since fair treatment of the customers seems to count for something.

The dispute is ethics in miniature. Ethics, also called moral philosophy, tries to say what makes an action right, a motive good and a life go well, with reasons that survive questioning. The shopkeeper’s case already holds its three main answers: judge the act by its results, by the principle it follows, or by what it shows about the person.

What ethics studies

The field is usually divided into three parts. Normative ethics looks for general principles of right action and the good life. Metaethics asks what moral claims are: whether “cruelty is wrong” states a fact, expresses an attitude or issues a command, and how anyone could know it. Applied ethics takes up particular disputes: abortion, euthanasia, animals, war, punishment, new technologies. Around these sit value theory (what is good in itself), moral psychology (how judgement and motivation work) and descriptive ethics, which records what societies believe without asking whether they are right.

Consequences, duties and character

Consequentialism holds that the right act is the one with the best outcome. Its classic form is utilitarianism, set out by Jeremy Bentham in 1789 and refined by John Stuart Mill, whose Utilitarianism (1861) holds that actions are right “in proportion as they tend to promote happiness” (the principle of utility). Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (1874) weighed it against egoism and intuitionism, and Peter Singer has pressed its demanding conclusions (the drowning child). Its strength is impartiality; its standing difficulty is justice. If one healthy visitor’s organs would save five dying patients, a simple count seems to favour killing him, and the trolley problem and its variants probe the difference between doing harm and allowing it.

Deontology answers that some acts are required or forbidden whatever their results. For Kant nothing is good without qualification except a good will, and the supreme moral principle is a categorical imperative: act only on a maxim you could will to be a universal law, and never treat humanity, in yourself or another, merely as a means. On this view, killing the visitor uses him merely as a means, and is wrong however the numbers fall. W. D. Ross proposed seven prima facie duties, from fidelity to non-maleficence, to be weighed when they conflict. Deontology’s own hard case is catastrophe: a rule against torturing one person even to save a million strikes many as absurd, and “threshold” deontologists let rules yield when the stakes are high enough.

Virtue ethics goes back to Aristotle, for whom the human good, eudaimonia (flourishing), is “a working of the Soul in the way of Excellence” over a whole life, and each virtue is a mean between two vices, as courage lies between cowardice and rashness (Nicomachean Ethics). It returned to analytic philosophy with Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) and was carried forward by Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) and Martha Nussbaum. Critics said it could not tell anyone what to do. Defenders such as Rosalind Hursthouse reply that the virtue terms yield rules of their own: do what is honest, not what is dishonest.

Other views cut across the three. Ethical egoism says I ought to do whatever best serves my own interest, a normative claim distinct from psychological egoism’s description of what people actually pursue. Contractualists, from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls and his veil of ignorance, ground moral rules in what people would agree to. The ethics of care puts relationships and attention to particular others at the centre.

Are there moral facts?

Two arguments shaped modern metaethics. David Hume noticed in his Treatise (1739–40) that writers on morality slide from “is” to “ought”, and asked that “a reason should be given” for the step (the is–ought problem). G. E. Moore argued in Principia Ethica (1903) that goodness is not any natural property such as pleasure, since one can always sensibly ask whether something pleasant is good, and concluded that it is real but non-natural.

Others drew the opposite lesson. A. J. Ayer’s emotivism, in Language, Truth and Logic (1936), treated moral sentences as expressions of attitude, nearer to cheering than to stating a fact; R. M. Hare read them as universal prescriptions. Ross held that basic duties are self-evident, as mathematical axioms are (ethical intuitionism). Moral realists answer the argument from disagreement by noting that people disagree in virtually every field, including fields with facts to get right; opponents reply that moral disagreement is better explained if moral claims state no facts, or if there are none to state. Moral relativism, with roots in Herodotus and Protagoras, makes moral truth relative to a culture or standpoint. Many take it to support tolerance, though philosophers often doubt that a metaethical view can settle that by itself.

In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asks whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved (the Euthyphro dilemma). Divine command theorists reply that God’s commands come from perfect goodness; critics answer that this assumes a standard of goodness prior to the commands, a debate that continues in the philosophy of religion.

A short history

In Greece, Socrates, as Plato portrays him, made the question of how to live central to philosophy, and Plato’s Republic asks, through the ring of Gyges, whether someone who could do injustice unseen would still have reason to be just. The Stoics taught that virtue alone is enough for happiness, and the Epicureans that pleasure is the good, found in tranquillity and a simple life rather than in indulgence. Thomas Aquinas built an ethics of natural law, and al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā kept ethics, with politics, among the practical sciences of the Greek scheme they inherited.

In the modern period Hobbes traced morality to self-interest and agreement, Hume to sentiment, Kant to reason, and Bentham and Mill to the general happiness, while Friedrich Nietzsche attacked Christian and Kantian morality alike. After the metaethics of the early twentieth century came Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) and, in the same years, Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” (1971), with its violinist, and Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972).

Ethics in other traditions

Indian ethics is organised around dharma (duty, righteousness), karma (action and its fruits) and the four puruṣārthas or aims of life: dharma, artha (prosperity), kāma (pleasure) and mokṣa (liberation). The Bhagavad Gītā opens with Arjuna refusing to fight his own kinsmen, and Kṛṣṇa’s reply includes, in Edwin Arnold’s verse, “Let right deeds be Thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them”. Jain ethics makes ahiṃsā (non-violence) its principal virtue. Buddhist ethics centres on compassion for all beings, and scholars debate whether it is best read as virtue ethics, as Damien Keown proposed in 1992, or as consequentialism.

Confucius made ren (humaneness) and li (ritual propriety) the core of an ethics of relationships. Mencius argued that anyone who suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well would feel alarm and compassion, not to win favour or praise, and so that everyone has “sprouts” of benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom to cultivate. Mozi (c. 470–c. 391 BCE) defended impartial care and judged practices by the good they produce, a view scholars describe as an early form of consequentialism.

In Egypt, maat (truth, balance and harmony) was the measure of right conduct, and the maxims attributed to Ptahhotep, among the earliest works of Egyptian wisdom literature, teach it. In Kwame Gyekye’s account of African ethics, character and moral personhood are central, and morality is an ethics of duty and the common good more than of rights.

What ethics means now

Much of the field’s work is now applied: bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, and the ethics of war and of technology. Theories of punishment, retributivist, consequentialist or mixed, ask what could justify a state in deliberately burdening its citizens, and lead into the philosophy of law.

Ethics is one of my areas of competence, and my published work in it is on AI. In “Beyond Consent” I argue that for algorithmic welfare systems such as Aadhaar consent is not merely hard to secure but the wrong test of legitimacy, and that such institutions owe the people whose standing they produce legibility, non-abandonment and remediation (ethics of AI).

How to begin

The reading path below begins with the ring of Gyges, sets Mill and Kant side by side, and ends with Hume on is and ought; each library text comes with the passages that matter. For a survey, read the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entries listed below. The guides to UGC NET Philosophy and the UPSC Philosophy optional map the syllabus units onto these pages.