Major Divisions in ethics

1. NORMATIVE ETHICS
- The study of the principles, rules, or theories that guide our actions and judgments. Refers to
norms, or standards, of judgement – in this case, norms for judging rightness and goodness.
- The ultimate purpose of doing normative ethics is to try to establish the soundness of moral
norms, especially the norms embodied in a comprehensive moral system, or theory.
- We do normative ethics when we use critical reasoning to demonstrate that a moral principle
is justified, or that a professional conduct is contradictory or that of a proposed moral theory
is better than another.

2. APPLIED ETHICS
- The application of moral norms to specific moral issues or cases, particularly those in a
profession such as medicine or law.

Example: Questions like these drive the search for answers in applied ethics.
1. Did the doctor do right in performing that abortion?
2. Is it morally permissible for scientists to perform experiments on people without their consent?
3. Was it right for the journalist to distort her reporting to aid a particular side in the war?

3. METAETHICS
- The study of the meaning and logical structure of moral belief. It asks not whether an action
is right or whether a person’s character is good. It takes a step back from the concerns and
asks more fundamental questions about them.
- To do normative ethics, we must assume certain things about the meaning of moral terms
and the logical relations among them. But the job of metaethics is to question all these
assumptions, to see if they really make sense.
Example:
1. Is there such a thing as moral truth?
2. How can a moral principle be justified?
3. What does it mean for an action to be right?
4. Is good the same thing as desirable?

● In every division of ethics, we must be careful to distinguish between values and obligations
Values
- Instrumentally or extrinsically good
Obligation
- Intrinsically good

Moral traits of moral principle

1. Prescriptivity
- Shares this trait with all normative discourse and is used to appraise behavior, assign praise and
blame, and produce feelings of satisfaction or guilt.

2. Universalizability
- Moral principles must apply to all people who are in a relevantly similar situation. This trait is an
extension of the principle of consistency.
- Universalizability applies to all evaluative judgments. If I say that X is a good Y, then I am logically
committed to judge that anything relevantly similar to X is a good Y.

3. Overridingness
- Moral principles have predominant authority and override other kinds of principles.

4. Practicality
- A moral principle must have practicability, which means that it must be workable and its rules must
not lay a heavy burden on us when we follow them.
- Accordingly, most ethical systems take human limitations into consideration.

5. Publicity
- Moral principles must be made public in order to guide our actions.
 - Publicity is necessary because we use principles to prescribe behavior, give advice, and assign
praise and blame. It would be self-defeating to keep them a secret.

Domains of ethical assessment

1. Action
● A right act is an act that is permissible for you to do. It may be either (a) obligatory or (b) optional
a. An obligatory act is one that morality requires you to do; it is not permissible for you to refrain from
doing it.
b. An optional act is one that is neither obligatory nor wrong to do. It is not your duty to do it, nor is it
your duty not to do it. Neither doing it nor not doing it would be wrong.