Ethical Theories Overview

Focuses on various ethical theories, their vocabularies, and the distinctions between moral values.

Logic: Science of reasoning; explains the 'why' behind phenomena.
Ethics (Morality): Study of moral values; involves categorizing actions as right or wrong, good or bad.
Epistemology: Study of knowledge; moral epistemology explores how we determine rightness and wrongness.
Aesthetics: Study of beauty and artistic values; relates to ethics in understanding morality's aesthetic aspects.
Metaphysics: Explores the nature of existence and reality, questions about the nature of objects and their properties.

Goodness and Badness: Properties of things; help guide behavior.
Rightness and Wrongness: Properties of actions; linked to laws and rules governing behavior.
Justice: Related to morality; implies a sense of matching actions to their deserving outcomes in society.

Divine Command: Goodness determined by a divine entity; includes commands and moral laws.
Naturalism: Goodness derived from nature and empirical reality.
Egoism: Good informed by human desires or pleasure; viewed skeptically in moral discussions.
Hedonism: Pleasure simplifies the definition of good and bad.
Human Conventions: Goodness constructed through societal decisions and individual preferences.

Deontological Ethics (Deontic): Right actions are determined by duties and rights; emphasizes moral obligations.
Consequentialism: Rightness based on the outcomes or consequences of actions; focused on achieving the most good or utility.

Rightness and wrongness are regulated by rules.
Goodness and badness are more about intrinsic values tied to improvement of societal actions.
Explore conflicts between rights to resolve moral dilemmas.

Ethical theory encourages critical discussion about definitions of good, right, and how they govern societal behavior.
Emphasizes understanding different viewpoints and the deeper implications of moral judgments in philosophy.