Normative Ethics

What it asks

Everyone judges particular acts. Normative ethics asks for the principle behind the judgements - something general enough to settle cases nobody has considered, and defensible enough to override a strong intuition when the two conflict.

The three standing answers pick out different things as fundamental. What matters is the outcome; what matters is the act's conformity to a rule; what matters is the character it comes from. Each is plausible, each generates a full account, and each says something in some case that almost nobody can accept.

The recurring problems

Where consequentialism ends. If only outcomes matter, then any act is permitted when the numbers are large enough - and the objection is not that this is counterintuitive but that a theory with no constraints seems to have lost something the word morality was for.

Where deontology binds too tightly. If some acts are forbidden whatever follows, then the rule holds when keeping it costs enormously. Kant's own conclusion that one may not lie to a murderer asking where your friend is hiding is the standard example, and he accepted it.

Whether virtue theory gives guidance. Act as a virtuous person would act is unimpeachable and does not tell you what to do. Whether that is a defect or the honest position is disputed within the school.

What intuitions are worth. Every theory is tested against cases and every theory eventually contradicts one. Whether a strong intuition is evidence or a prejudice to be overridden is the methodological question underneath all of them.

How it developed

Aristotle's account is the ancestor of virtue ethics: right action flows from a settled character, and the virtues are the dispositions a flourishing life requires.

Kant's Groundwork in 1785 made rightness a matter of the principle one acts on and whether it could be universalised, independently of consequences.

Bentham and Mill made it a matter of consequences alone, and utilitarianism had immediate practical force - it was an argument for reform, and it was used as one.

For a century and a half those two were the whole field. Anscombe's 1958 attack revived the third, and the trolley cases that Foot introduced in 1967 and Thomson developed gave the dispute a shared set of test cases. Those cases have since been used more, and more loosely, than any other device in philosophy.

The positions within it

Consequentialism in act and rule forms; deontology; virtue ethics; contractualism; care ethics; ethical intuitionism and particularism, which deny that a general theory is available at all. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

The three-way contest is stable, and the most interesting movement is convergence: sophisticated versions of each theory increasingly agree about cases while disagreeing about why.

The live methodological question is whether general theory was the right ambition. Particularists argue that a consideration counting in favour of an act in one case can count against it in another, which would mean the whole project of stating what makes right acts right is misconceived.