Basic Ethical Theories

1. Basic Ethical Theories Soraj Hongladarom Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

2. Outline • What is ethics? • Normative ethics and metaethics • Ethical theories • Consequentialism • Non-consequentialism • Application

3. What is ethics? • Ethics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the questions of what ought to be done or what ought not to be done, under what kinds of reasons. • Ethical deliberation is as important as human culture itself; it originated as something based on religion, but later developed to be more secular.

4. Major Ethical Theories • Ancient/Religious • Major religions: Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc. • Indigenous belief systems • What they share with one another. • Virtue ethics • Based on the thoughts of the Greek, systematized by Aristotle • Emphasis on development of character.

5. Major Ethical Theories • Modern • Immanuel Kant - deontological ethics • ‘deontos’ is Greek for ‘duty’ • Emphasis on the role of duty and conforming to rational ideal. • J. S. Mill - utilitarianism, or consequentialist ethics • “Greatest good for the greatest number” • Calculation of goods and utilities. • What these two theories share in common.

6. Major Ethical Theories • ‘Postmodern’ theories • F. Nietzsche - ‘revaluation of all values’; ‘genealogy of morals’ • Basic assumption of the postmoderns - distrust in the power of reason, belief that true objectivity cannot be found, ‘truth’ is a construction. • What this means for applied ethics.

7. Mapping • So we have four major theories, or groups of theories. • The ancient/religious and the virtue ethics groups can be put together, since they do not subscribe to the modern belief in individual power of reason. • The postmoderns also distrust individual power of reason, but they share with the moderns distrust or disbelief in metaphysics.