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Ethics Article Media Additional Info Article Contents Introduction The origins of ethics Mythical accounts Introduction of moral codes Problems of divine origin Prehuman ethics Nonhuman behaviour Kinship and reciprocity Anthropology and ethics The history of Western ethics Ancient civilizations to the end of the 19th century The ancient Middle East and Asia The Middle East India China Ancient and Classical Greece Ancient Greece Socrates Plato Aristotle Later Greek and Roman ethics The Stoics The Epicureans Christian ethics from the New Testament to the Scholastics Ethics in the New Testament St. Augustine St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics The Renaissance and the Reformation Machiavelli The first Protestants The British tradition from Hobbes to the utilitarians Hobbes Early intuitionists: Cudworth, More, and Clarke Shaftesbury and the moral sense school Butler on self-interest and conscience The climax of moral sense theory: Hutcheson and Hume The intuitionist response: Price and Reid Utilitarianism Paley Bentham Mill Sidgwick The Continental tradition from Spinoza to Nietzsche Spinoza Leibniz Rousseau Kant Hegel Marx Nietzsche Western ethics from the beginning of the 20th century Metaethics Moore and the naturalistic fallacy Modern intuitionism Emotivism Existentialism Universal prescriptivism Later developments in metaethics Moral realism Kantian constructivism: a middle ground? Irrealist views: projectivism and expressivism Ethics and reasons for action Normative ethics The debate over consequentialism Varieties of consequentialism Objections to consequentialism An ethics of prima facie duties Rawls’s theory of justice Rights theories Natural law ethics Virtue ethics Feminist ethics Ethical egoism Applied ethics Equality Animals Environmental ethics War and peace Abortion, euthanasia, and the value of human life Bioethics Home Philosophy & Religion Ethical Issues Ethics philosophy Print print Print Please select which sections you would like to print: Table Of Contents Cite Share Share Share to social media Facebook Twitter URL https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethics-philosophy More Give Feedback External Websites Feedback Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Feedback Type Select a type (Required) Factual Correction Spelling/Grammar Correction Link Correction Additional Information Other Your Feedback Submit Feedback Thank you for your feedback Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Join Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work! External Websites Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Ethics The Catholic Encyclopedia - Ethics Cornell Law School - Legal Information Institute - Ethics Britannica Websites Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. ethics and morality - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up) WRITTEN BY Peter Singer Peter Albert David Singer is an moral philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics... Last Updated: Nov 19, 2020 See Article History Alternative Title: moral philosophy Ethics, also called moral philosophy, the discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad and morally right and wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles. Top Questions What is ethics? The term ethics may refer to the philosophical study of the concepts of moral right and wrong and moral good and bad, to any philosophical theory of what is morally right and wrong or morally good and bad, and to any system or code of moral rules, principles, or values. The last may be associated with particular religions, cultures, professions, or virtually any other group that is at least partly characterized by its moral outlook. How is ethics different from morality? Traditionally, ethics referred to the philosophical study of morality, the latter being a more or less systematic set of beliefs, usually held in common by a group, about how people should live. Ethics also referred to particular philosophical theories of morality. Later the term was applied to particular (and narrower) moral codes or value systems. Ethics and morality are now used almost interchangeably in many contexts, but the name of the philosophical study remains ethics. Why does ethics matter? Ethics matters because (1) it is part of how many groups define themselves and thus part of the identity of their individual members, (2) other-regarding values in most ethical systems both reflect and foster close human relationships and mutual respect and trust, and (3) it could be “rational” for a self-interested person to be moral, because his or her self-interest is arguably best served in the long run by reciprocating the moral behaviour of others. Is ethics a social science? No. Understood as equivalent to morality, ethics could be studied as a social-psychological or historical phenomenon, but in that case it would be an object of social-scientific study, not a social science in itself. Understood as the philosophical study of moral concepts, ethics is a branch of philosophy, not of social science. How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? And what of the more particular questions that face us: is it right to be dishonest in a good cause? Can we justify living in opulence while elsewhere in the world people are starving? Is going to war justified in cases where it is likely that innocent people will be killed? Is it wrong to clone a human being or to destroy human embryos in medical research? What are our obligations, if any, to the generations of humans who will come after us and to the nonhuman animals with whom we share the planet? Ethics deals with such questions at all levels. Its subject consists of the fundamental issues of practical decision making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong. The terms ethics and morality are closely related. It is now common to refer to ethical judgments or to ethical principles where it once would have been more accurate to speak of moral judgments or moral principles. These applications are an extension of the meaning of ethics. In earlier usage, the term referred not to morality itself but to the field of study, or branch of inquiry, that has morality as its subject matter. In this sense, ethics is equivalent to moral philosophy. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now Although ethics has always been viewed as a branch of philosophy, its all-embracing practical nature links it with many other areas of study, including anthropology, biology, economics, history, politics, sociology, and theology. Yet, ethics remains distinct from such disciplines because it is not a matter of factual knowledge in the way that the sciences and other branches of inquiry are. Rather, it has to do with determining the nature of normative theories and applying these sets of principles to practical moral problems. This article, then, will deal with ethics as a field of philosophy, especially as it has developed in the West. For coverage of religious conceptions of ethics and the ethical systems associated with world religions, see Buddhism; Christianity; Confucianism; Hinduism; Jainism; Judaism; Sikhism. The origins of ethics Mythical accounts Introduction of moral codes When did ethics begin and how did it originate? If one has in mind ethics proper—i.e., the systematic study of what is morally right and wrong—it is clear that ethics could have come into existence only when human beings started to reflect on the best way to live. This reflective stage emerged long after human societies had developed some kind of morality, usually in the form of customary standards of right and wrong conduct. The process of reflection tended to arise from such customs, even if in the end it may have found them wanting. Accordingly, ethics began with the introduction of the first moral codes. Virtually every human society has some form of myth to explain the origin of morality. In the Louvre in Paris there is a black Babylonian column with a relief showing the sun god Shamash presenting the code of laws to Hammurabi (died c. 1750 bce), known as the Code of Hammurabi. The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) account of God’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses (flourished 14th–13th century bce) on Mount Sinai might be considered another example. In the dialogue Protagoras by Plato (428/427–348/347 bce), there is an avowedly mythical account of how Zeus took pity on the hapless humans, who were physically no match for the other beasts. To make up for these deficiencies, Zeus gave humans a moral sense and the capacity for law and justice, so that they could live in larger communities and cooperate with one another. Code of HammurabiDetail of the stela inscribed with the Code of Hammurabi showing the king before the god Shamash, bas-relief from Susa, 18th century bce; in the Louvre, Paris. © Art Media/Heritage-Images/age fotostock That morality should be invested with all the mystery and power of divine origin is not surprising. Nothing else could provide such strong reasons for accepting the moral law. By attributing a divine origin to morality, the priesthood became its interpreter and guardian and thereby secured for itself a power that it would not readily relinquish. This link between morality and religion has been so firmly forged that it is still sometimes asserted that there can be no morality without religion. According to this view, ethics is not an independent field of study but rather a branch of theology (see moral theology). There is some difficulty, already known to Plato, with the view that morality was created by a divine power. In his dialogue Euthyphro, Plato considered the suggestion that it is divine approval that makes an action good. Plato pointed out that, if this were the case, one could not say that the gods approve of such actions because they are good. Why then do they approve of them? Is their approval entirely arbitrary? Plato considered this impossible and so held that there must be some standards of right or wrong that are independent of the likes and dislikes of the gods. Modern philosophers have generally accepted Plato’s argument, because the alternative implies that if, for example, the gods had happened to approve of torturing children and to disapprove of helping one’s neighbours, then torture would have been good and neighbourliness bad. Ethics Quick Facts key people Socrates Aristotle Plato St. Augustine Immanuel Kant Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Benedict de Spinoza David Hume Adam Smith John Stuart Mill related topics Bioethics Legal ethics Biocentrism Ethical relativism Ethics of care Casuistry Corporate code of conduct Intergenerational ethics Hedonism Speciesism Load Next Page Inspire your inbox – Sign up for daily fun facts about this day in history, updates, and special offers. 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