Ethics

Traditions by region

Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right in addition to wrong behavior". the field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value; these fields comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology.

Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by introducing concepts such(a) as good and evil, modification and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. As a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory.

Three major areas of explore within ethics recognized today are:

Meta-ethics

Meta-ethics is the branch of philosophical ethics that asks how we understand, know about, and what we mean when we talk approximately what is correct and what is wrong. An ethical impeach pertaining to a specific practical situation—such as, "Should I eat this particular piece of chocolate cake?"—cannot be a meta-ethical impeach rather, this is an applied ethical question. A meta-ethical question is summary and relates to a wide range of more specific practical questions. For example, "Is it ever possible to draw 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. Moore's Principia Ethica from 1903. In it he first wrote approximately what he called the naturalistic fallacy. Moore was seen to reject naturalism in ethics, in his open-question argument. This filed thinkers look again at second formation questions about ethics. Earlier, the Scottish philosopher David Hume had increase forward a similar picture 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 opinion 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. 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 manner of things or stuff quoted to by ethical propositions. Non-descriptivists and non-cognitivists believe that ethics does non need a specific ontology since ethical propositions do not refer. This is call as an anti-realist position. Realists, on the other hand, must explain what types of entities, properties or states are applicable for ethics, how they have value, and why they guide and motivate our actions.

Moral skepticism or moral scepticism is a class of metaethical theories in which any members entail that no one has any moral knowledge. many moral skeptics also make the stronger, modal claim that moral knowledge is impossible. Moral skepticism is especially against moral realism which holds the view that there are knowable and objective moral truths.

Some proponents of moral skepticism add Pyrrho, Aenesidemus, Sextus Empiricus, David Hume, Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and J.L. Mackie.

Moral skepticism is divided into three sub-classes:

All of these three theories share the same conclusions, which are as follows:

However, used to refer to every one of two or more people or things method arrives at a and b by different routes.

Moral error theory holds that we do not know that any moral claim is true because

Epistemological moral skepticism is a subclass of theory, the members of which include Pyrrhonian moral skepticism and dogmatic moral skepticism. All members of epistemological moral skepticism share two things: first, they acknowledge that we are unjustified in believing any moral claim, and second, they are agnostic on whether i is true i.e. on whether all moral claims are false.

Noncognitivism holds that we can never know that any moral claim is true because moral claims are incapable of being true or false they are not truth-apt. Instead, moral claims are imperatives e.g. "Don't steal babies!", expressions of emotion e.g. "stealing babies: Boo!", or expressions of "pro-attitudes" "I do not believe that babies should be stolen."