Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Overview

What’s New in… Ethics (part 1!)

Our overview articles reveal what’s going on now in different areas of philosophy. There is just too much happening in ethics for a single overview, so we asked Abdelkader Aoudjit to describe and comment on one strong tendency which is a major feature of the current ethics scene – the rebellion against theories.

The leading theories of modern ethics are deontology (‘duty ethics’) and utilitarianism. The first is best represented by Immanuel Kant for whom an action is moral only if it can be willed to be a universal law for everyone and is done out of respect for duty, regardless of the consequences and what one happens to desire. The second is usually associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who argue that a moral action is the one that results in the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, everyone given equal consideration. Despite their differences – deontology focuses on rules and is rooted in reason while utilitarianism focuses on results and is rooted in psychology – both theories express the Enlightenment quest for universal laws that govern everything and the desire to make morality secular, scientific, objective, and rational. Modern moral theories combine a variety of moral considerations into systematic frameworks centred around a major idea derived from reflection on the nature of the right or the good, ideal conditions of choice, human nature, or agency.

…