Ethics

What it asks

Socrates put it in the form the branch has kept: not what should I do now, but how should one live. Those are different questions, and the difference is why ethics is not a list of rules. A rule tells you what to do in a case someone anticipated; a life has to be lived through cases nobody anticipated.

Two things are being asked at once. What makes a particular act right or wrong - and what makes anything right or wrong, which is a question about the first question rather than another instance of it. Keeping those apart is the single most useful distinction the branch has produced.

The recurring problems

Which thing is being assessed. The act, the rule it follows, the outcome it produces, or the character it comes from. The three great families of theory each pick a different one, and much apparent disagreement about cases is really disagreement about this.

The demandingness problem. If suffering elsewhere makes a claim on you, the claim does not obviously stop at any particular point, and a theory that requires everything of everyone is not one anybody can live by. Every theory needs a story about where the limit is and why.

Moral luck. Two drivers are equally careless; a child steps out in front of one of them. We blame that one far more, and it is not clear that we are wrong to, or that we are right.

Motivation. Knowing what is right does not make anyone do it. Whether a moral judgement carries its own motivation, or needs a desire supplied from elsewhere, divides the field.

How it developed

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics set the terms for the ancient and medieval periods by asking what a flourishing human life consists of, and answering in terms of character rather than rules. The Stoics and Epicureans gave rival accounts of the same question.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries replaced character with principle. Kant argued that an act is right if its rule could be willed universally, regardless of what it produces. Bentham and Mill argued the opposite, that only outcomes matter and that the right act is the one producing most good. Those two positions dominated for a century and a half.

Elizabeth Anscombe broke the deadlock in 1958 by arguing that both sides had inherited the idea of moral obligation from a religious framework they had abandoned, leaving the notion doing work nothing supported. Her paper revived virtue ethics almost single-handedly and made the field three-cornered rather than two.

The other twentieth-century change was the separation of metaethics. Once philosophers began asking what moral claims MEAN rather than which are true, that became a distinct enquiry, and for a period it displaced the original question almost entirely.

The positions within it

Consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics are the three standing answers, and all three are covered in the Schools section. Contractarianism offers a fourth, grounding rightness in what people could agree to. Care ethics challenges the assumption that impartiality is the moral default.

None of these is a branch. They are rival answers given inside this one.

Where it stands now

The three-cornered contest is stable rather than resolving, and the interesting work has moved to the edges: to particular problems where the theories give different verdicts, and to empirical findings about how moral judgement actually works.

Applied ethics, once treated as the practical afterthought, is now where most of the field's activity is - and it has fed back, because cases in medicine and technology have produced problems the general theories were not built for.