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Defining ethics

The English word ethics is derived from the Ancient Greek word ēthikós (ἠθικός), meaning “relating to ones character”, which itself comes from the root word êthos (ἦθος) meaning “character, moral nature”.5 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”.6 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”.7 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.”8 Paul and Elder state that most people confuse ethics with behaving in accordance with social conventions, religious beliefs, the law, and do not treat ethics as a stand-alone concept.9

The word ethics in English refers to several things.10 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 moral 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.”11 Williams describes the content of this area of inquiry as addressing the very broad question, “how one should live”.12 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.”13 Ethics can also be used to describe a particular persons own idiosyncratic principles or habits.14 For example: “Joe has strange ethics.” Ethics is a normative science.

Meta-ethics

Main article: Meta-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.15 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 a 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. Moores 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.

Studies of how we know in ethics divide into cognitivism and non-cognitivism; these, respectively, take descriptive and non-descriptive approaches to moral goodness or value. Non-cognitivism is the view that when we judge something as morally right or wrong, this is neither true nor false. We may, for example, be only expressing our emotional feelings about these things.16 Cognitivism can then be seen as the claim that when we talk about right and wrong, we are talking about matters of fact.

The ontology of ethics is about value-bearing things or properties, that is, the kind of things or stuff referred to by ethical propositions. Non-descriptivists and non-cognitivists believe that ethics does not need a specific ontology since ethical propositions do not refer. This is known as an anti-realist position. Realists, on the other hand, must explain what kind of entities, properties or states are relevant for ethics, how they have value, and why they guide and motivate our actions.17

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