Ethics, Theories of

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with morality. Ethicists are concerned with a wide range of topics, such as human nature; the meaning of life; the nature of value; how judgments are made; how judgments can be improved; how moral attitudes arise and change; and the workings of morally significant mental states such as love, hate, greed, envy, indifference, pity, desire, aversion, pleasure, and pain. Moral or ethical theories offer the means of understanding significant elements in these and other areas of inquiry.

Ethical theories tend either toward merely describing or toward both describing and judging. As a result, some moral theories seem to belong to anthropology, psychology, or sociology, while others look like instances of what ethics purports to study—that is, like moral doctrines or judgments. For this reason, a major distinction employed by moral theorists distinguishes descriptive from prescriptive, or normative, theories, or elements of theories.

Moral judgments tend to state that something is either good or bad or that something agrees or conflicts with our obligations. Consequently, a major division in moral theories is between theories of value (axiology) and theories of obligation (deontology). In each area, ethicists want to determine the meaning of moral judgments, their truth or falsity, their objectivity or subjectivity, how judgments are made, how they can be tested, how they can be justified, and the possibility of organizing judgments under first principles. A third major distinction places theories about the meaning of moral judgments in a category of their own called metaethics. Obviously, metaethical questions arise in all areas of ethics.

Prescriptive or normative moral thinking recommends at least one moral evaluation, or else it attempts the same for at least one moral obligation. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Cynics sought both to find the best kind of life and to strongly recommend the judgment that it was in fact the best. Others, such as Immanuel Kant, theorized about the nature of obligation and also provided grounds for justifying or recommending certain obligations. The theories of David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Darwinism, and Logical Positivism exemplify the tendency to separate the task of description from that of prescription, or to eschew prescription altogether, in order to describe and organize moral judgments for the sake of understanding alone.

The unwavering pursuit of the metaethical question of the meaning of moral judgments brought many recent philosophers to the conclusion that moral judgments are not the sort of statements that can be true or false but instead express resolutions, preferences, feelings, demands, or other states of mind. Hume thought that they reported subjective feelings, so that a judgment such as “Insider trading is immoral” would not be understood as ascribing a predicate to insider trading but as saying something like “I disapprove of that act.” A. J. Ayer, a Logical Positivist, believed that moral judgments did not report feelings but merely expressed them. For him, the statement “Insider trading is immoral” merely expresses a negative emotional reaction to stealing—along the lines of “Boo insider trading!” Such expressions are neither true nor false because they do not describe anything. Hume and Ayer represent the school known as Emotivism. A neighboring school, Prescriptivism, interprets “Insider trading is immoral” as an imperative, “Do not engage in insider trading,” which is neither true nor false because it is a command rather than a description.

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