Moral community

Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct. The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value, and thus comprises the branch of philosophy called axiology. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. As a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy also is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory. Three major areas of study within ethics recognized today are: The English word 'ethics' is derived from the Ancient Greek word ēthikós (ἠθικός), meaning 'relating to one's character', which itself comes from the root word êthos (ἦθος) meaning 'character, moral nature'. This word was transferred into Latin as ethica and then into French as éthique, from which it was transferred into English. Rushworth Kidder states that 'standard definitions of ethics have typically included such phrases as 'the science of the ideal human character' or 'the science of moral duty''. Richard William Paul and Linda Elder define ethics as 'a set of concepts and principles that guide us in determining what behavior helps or harms sentient creatures'. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy states that the word 'ethics' is 'commonly used interchangeably with 'morality' ... and sometimes it is used more narrowly to mean the moral principles of a particular tradition, group or individual.' Paul and Elder state that most people confuse ethics with behaving in accordance with social conventions, religious beliefs and the law and don't treat ethics as a stand-alone concept. The word ethics in English refers to several things. It can refer to philosophical ethics or moral philosophy—a project that attempts to use reason to answer various kinds of ethical questions. As the English philosopher Bernard Williams writes, attempting to explain moral philosophy: 'What makes an inquiry a philosophical one is reflective generality and a style of argument that claims to be rationally persuasive.' Williams describes the content of this area of inquiry as addressing the very broad question, 'how one should live'. Ethics can also refer to a common human ability to think about ethical problems that is not particular to philosophy. As bioethicist Larry Churchill has written: 'Ethics, understood as the capacity to think critically about moral values and direct our actions in terms of such values, is a generic human capacity.' Ethics can also be used to describe a particular person's own idiosyncratic principles or habits. For example: 'Joe has strange ethics.' Meta-ethics is the branch of philosophical ethics that asks how we understand, know about, and what we mean when we talk about what is right and what is wrong. An ethical question pertaining to a particular practical situation—such as, 'Should I eat this particular piece of chocolate cake?'—cannot be a meta-ethical question (rather, this is an applied ethical question). A meta-ethical question is abstract and relates to a wide range of more specific practical questions. For example, 'Is it ever possible to have secure knowledge of what is right and wrong?' is a meta-ethical question. Meta-ethics has always accompanied philosophical ethics. For example, Aristotle implies that less precise knowledge is possible in ethics than in other spheres of inquiry, and he regards ethical knowledge as depending upon habit and acculturation in a way that makes it distinctive from other kinds of knowledge. Meta-ethics is also important in G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica from 1903. In it he first wrote about what he called the naturalistic fallacy. Moore was seen to reject naturalism in ethics, in his Open Question Argument. This made thinkers look again at second order questions about ethics. Earlier, the Scottish philosopher David Hume had put forward a similar view on the difference between facts and values.