Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Ethics

Introduction to Ethics

Ethics (or moral philosophy) is crucially important because it is devoted to answering questions like these:

“What is best?”
“What is the good life?”
“How should I live?”
“How should I behave towards other people?”
“What is the purpose of life?”

These are questions about what makes things valuable; they were the questions which drew me to philosophy in the first place. As you can probably see from this list, the subject holds plenty of interest even for people with no marked tendency to behave well!

Meta-Ethics and Practical Ethics

Like so many subjects (maths, physics, waterskiing), moral philosophy can be divided into a theoretical side (‘meta-ethics’) and a practical side. The back-room boys and girls of moral philosophy examine the ultimate reasons for doing things, search for fundamental values, and try to understand the language and the logic of moral claims. Practical ethics (or applied ethics, as it is also called), looks at what we should do when confronted by specific moral problems. Its practitioners are the glory merchants who get invited onto government commissions to examine the rights and wrongs of things like euthanasia, public conduct and experimentation on human embryos.

…