Ethics - Moral realism

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

References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics

Images

For Students

ethics summary

Read Next

Well-balanced of stones on the top of boulder

What’s the Difference Between Morality and Ethics?

Aristotle (384-322 BC), Ancient Greek philosopher and scientist. One of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western thought, Aristotle established the foundations for the modern scientific method of enquiry. Statue

Philosophers to Know, Part I

Plato (left) and Aristotle, detail from School of Athens, fresco by Raphael, 1508-11; in the Stanza della Segnatura, the Vatican. Plato points to the heavens and the realm of Forms, Aristotle to the earth and the realm of things.

Plato and Aristotle: How Do They Differ?

Black and white photo of people in courtroom, hands raised, pledging

Order in the Court: 10 “Trials of the Century”

Aristotle statue located at Stageira of Greece

Aristotle at 2,400

Discover

Pluto. The Changing Faces of Pluto. Most detailed view to date of the entire surface of the dwarf planet Pluto, as constructed from multiple NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken from 2002 to 2003.

10 Important Dates in Pluto History

Solar Eclipse, Eclipse, Solar Flare, Outer Space, Astronomy

What Causes Lunar and Solar Eclipses?

Adolf Hitler (Nazi, nazism, German leader).

9 Things You Might Not Know About Adolf Hitler

Vietnam War. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson awards the Distinguished Service Cross to First Lieutenant Marty A. Hammer, during a visit to military personnel, Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam, October 26, 1966. President Johnson

Vietnam War Timeline

Albert Einstein in Washington, D.C. c. 1921-1923. Physicist

The Solar Eclipse That Made Albert Einstein a Science Celebrity

In this aerial photo, structures are damaged and destroyed October 15, 2005 in Balakot, Pakistan. It is estimated that 90% of the city of Balakot was leveled by the earthquake. The death toll in the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck northern Pakistan on October 8, 2005 is believed to be 38,000 with at least 1,300 more dead in Indian Kashmir. SEE CONTENT NOTES.

6 of the World’s Deadliest Natural Disasters

Still from the film Deliverance, 1919. The story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. View shows Keller in the cockpit/front seat of an airplane.

How Did Helen Keller Fly a Plane?

After the publication of Moore’s Principia Ethica, naturalism in Britain was given up for dead. The first attempts to revive it were made in the late 1950s by Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001). In response to Hare’s intimation that anything could be a moral principle so long as it satisfied the formal requirement of universalizability in his sense, Foot and Anscombe urged that it was absurd to think that anything so universalizable could be a moral principle; the counterexample they offered was the principle that one should clap one’s hands three times an hour. (This principle is universalizable in ...(100 of 41429 words)

Access the full article

Help support true facts by becoming a member.