Ethics
Ethics
Theoretical
Meta-ethics
Normative · Descriptive
Consequentialism
Deontology
Evolutionary ethics
Virtue ethics
Ethics of care
Good and evil · Morality
Applied
Bio-ethics · Cyberethics ·
Neuroethics · Medical
Engineering · Environmental
Human rights · Animal rights
Legal · Media
Business · Marketing
Religion · War
Core issues
Justice · Value
Right · Duty · Virtue
Equality · Freedom · Trust
Evil · Free will · Consent
Moral responsibility
Key thinkers
Confucius · Mencius
Plato · Aristotle · Aquinas
Hume · Kant · Bentham · Mill
Kierkegaard · Nietzsche
Rawls · Parfit · Singer
Lists
List of ethics topics
List of ethicists
Ethics portal
Ethics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to address
questions about morality, such as what the fundamental
semantic, ontological, and epistemic nature of ethics or
morality is (meta-ethics), how moral values should be
determined (normative ethics), how a moral outcome
can be achieved in specific situations (applied ethics),
how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what
its nature is (moral psychology), and what moral values
people actually abide by (descriptive ethics).
Meta-ethics
Meta-ethics is concerned primarily with the meaning of
ethical judgments and/or prescriptions and with the
notion of which properties, if any, are responsible for
the truth or validity thereof. Meta-ethics as a discipline
gained attention with G.E. Moore’s famous work Principia
Ethica from 1903 in which Moore first addressed what he
referred to as the naturalistic fallacy. Moore’s rebuttal of
naturalistic ethics, his Open Question Argument sparked
an interest within the analytic branch of western philo-
sophy to concern oneself with second order questions
about ethics; specifically the semantics, epistemology
and ontology of ethics.
The semantics of ethics divides naturally into de-
scriptivism and non-descriptivism. Descriptivism holds
that ethical language (including ethical commands and
duties) is a subdivision of descriptive language and has
meaning in virtue of the same kind of pro