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 situ-
ations (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 pre-
scriptions and with the notion of which prop-
erties, 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 Argu-
ment sparked an interest within the analytic
branch of western philosophy to concern one-
self with second order questions about eth-
ics; specifically the semantics, epistemology
and ontology of ethics.
The semantics of ethics divides naturally
into descriptivism and non-descriptivism. De-
scriptivism holds that ethical language (in-
cluding ethical commands and duties) is a
subdivision of descriptive language and has
meaning in virtue of the same