Ethics - Existentialism, Morality, Meaning

ethics

Table of Contents

Introduction & Top Questions
The origins of ethics
- Mythical accounts
  - Introduction of moral codes
  - Problems of divine origin
- Prehuman ethics
  - Nonhuman behaviour
  - Kinship and reciprocity
- Anthropology and ethics
The history of Western ethics
- Ancient civilizations to the end of the 19th century
  - The ancient Middle East and Asia
    - The Middle East
    - India
    - China
  - Ancient and Classical Greece
    - Ancient Greece
    - Socrates
    - Plato
    - Aristotle
  - Later Greek and Roman ethics
    - The Stoics
    - The Epicureans
  - Christian ethics from the New Testament to the Scholastics
    - Ethics in the New Testament
    - St. Augustine
    - St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics
  - The Renaissance and the Reformation
    - Machiavelli
    - The first Protestants
  - The British tradition from Hobbes to the utilitarians
    - Hobbes
    - Early intuitionists: Cudworth, More, and Clarke
    - Shaftesbury and the moral sense school
    - Butler on self-interest and conscience
    - The climax of moral sense theory: Hutcheson and Hume
    - The intuitionist response: Price and Reid
    - Utilitarianism
      Paley
      Bentham
      Mill
      Sidgwick
  - The Continental tradition from Spinoza to Nietzsche
    - Spinoza
    - Leibniz
    - Rousseau
    - Kant
    - Hegel
    - Marx
    - Nietzsche
- Western ethics from the beginning of the 20th century
  - Metaethics
    - Moore and the naturalistic fallacy
    - Modern intuitionism
    - Emotivism
    - Existentialism
    - Universal prescriptivism
    - Later developments in metaethics
      Moral realism
      Kantian constructivism: a middle ground?
      Irrealist views: projectivism and expressivism
      Ethics and reasons for action
  - Normative ethics
    - The debate over consequentialism
    - Varieties of consequentialism
    - Objections to consequentialism
    - An ethics of prima facie duties
    - Rawls’s theory of justice
    - Rights theories
    - Natural law ethics
    - Virtue ethics
    - Feminist ethics
    - Ethical egoism
  - Applied ethics
    - Equality
    - Animals
    - Environmental ethics
    - War and peace
    - Abortion, euthanasia, and the value of human life
    - Bioethics

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At about this time a different form of subjectivism was gaining currency on the Continent and to some extent in the United States. Existentialism was as much a literary as a philosophical movement. Its leading figure, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), propounded his ideas in novels and plays as well as in his major philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). Sartre held that there is no God, and therefore human beings were not designed for any particular purpose. The existentialists expressed this by stating that “existence precedes essence.” Thus, they made clear their rejection of the Aristotelian notion that ...(100 of 41429 words)

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