Moral Philosophy

Logic and Principle

To varying extents within each philosophical school, moral philosophy attempts to base ethical decisions on rationality rather than on other decision-making bases such as faith. Philosophy attempts to separate nonrational factors such as faith, habit, belief, and bias from logical principles and analysis. In seeking to determine moral principles, moral philosophers attempt to look beyond the cultural and religious norms, customs, or habits that tell us to take certain actions. Rather, moral philosophy seeks truths that span time and location to identify principles that are moral regardless of situational specifics.

For example, a generally accepted moral principle is that lying is wrong. Philosophers can arrive at this principle through a multitude of moral tests. Through a utilitarian test, lying is wrong because it produces more harm than good. Through deontology, it is wrong because lying does not uphold the dignity and respect of others and because we would not want to be lied to ourselves, and the intent of lying is deception. Although these moral [Page 579]tests simplify the actual philosophies they represent, they allow us to see the principle that lying is morally wrong. But what about lying to save the life of a potential murder victim? Moral philosophy takes on such difficult questions of moral obligation, intention, consequences, duty, fairness, responsibility, and justice in the search for consistent methods for solving such dilemmas. Moral philosophy is often the most useful when a dilemma appears to have several “right” answers.

Approaches to Moral Philosophy

Moral philosophy can take three broad purposes or types of conceptual approaches: meta-ethics, defining what constitutes ethics; normative ethics, determining what rules or principles should guide ethical decisions; and applied ethics, the application of normative rules to specific ethical dilemmas. Normative ethics is the most prominent type of moral philosophy. Normative moral principles are of interest to public relations because they can guide practitioner decision making in a multiplicity of situations.

Applied moral philosophy studies the application of moral principles to decision making. Ethics assumes that an objective morality does exist and attempts to discover the rules, values, and principles that govern—or should govern—behavior. Ethics provides logical decision-making methods based on moral principles of right and wrong, whereas moral philosophy deals with the more abstract questions about what actually constitutes moral character, norms, values, and beliefs across societies.

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