Outline of ethics

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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to ethics.

Contents

Ethics (aka moral philosophy) branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct. [1] The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concern matters of value, and thus comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology. [2]

Branches

The following examples of questions that might be considered in each field illustrate the differences between the fields:

Applied ethics

Applied ethics – using philosophical methods, attempts to identify the morally correct course of action in various fields of human life.

Metaethics

practices of various schools of thought.

Cognitivism

Cognitivism

Non-cognitivism

Non-cognitivism

Normative ethics

Normative ethics – concerns what people should believe to be right and wrong.

Descriptive ethics

History

Concepts

Single principles

Guidelines and basic concepts

Human experience

Practical ethics

Law

Government agencies

Awards

Organizations

Persons influential in the field of ethics

Events

Publications

Books

Journals

See also

Related Research Articles

Applied ethics is the practical aspect of moral considerations. It is ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and leadership. For example, bioethics is concerned with identifying the best approach to moral issues in the life sciences, such as euthanasia, the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with ecological issues such as the responsibility of government and corporations to clean up pollution. Business ethics includes the duties of whistleblowers to the public and to their employers.

Axiology is the philosophical study of value. It includes questions about the nature and classification of values and about what kinds of things have value. It is intimately connected with various other philosophical fields that crucially depend on the notion of value, like ethics, aesthetics or philosophy of religion. It is also closely related to value theory and meta-ethics. The term was first used by Eduard von Hartmann in 1887 and by Paul Lapie in 1902.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethics</span> Philosophical study of morality

Ethics or moral philosophy is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. It investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. It is usually divided into three major fields: normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.

In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, and meaning of moral judgment. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.

Normative ethics is the study of ethical behaviour and is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates questions regarding how one ought to act, in a moral sense.

Bioethics is both a field of study and professional practice, interested in ethical issues related to health, including those emerging from advances in biology, medicine, and technologies. It proposes the discussion about moral discernment in society and it is often related to medical policy and practice, but also to broader questions as environment, well-being and public health. Bioethics is concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, theology and philosophy. It includes the study of values relating to primary care, other branches of medicine, ethical education in science, animal, and environmental ethics, and public health.

This index of ethics articles puts articles relevant to well-known ethical debates and decisions in one place - including practical problems long known in philosophy, and the more abstract subjects in law, politics, and some professions and sciences. It lists also those core concepts essential to understanding ethics as applied in various religions, some movements derived from religions, and religions discussed as if they were a theory of ethics making no special claim to divine status.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtue ethics</span> Normative ethical theories

Virtue ethics is an approach that treats virtue and character as the primary subjects of ethics, in contrast to other ethical systems that put consequences of voluntary acts, principles or rules of conduct, or obedience to divine authority in the primary role.

Descriptive ethics, also known as comparative ethics, is the study of people's beliefs about morality. It contrasts with prescriptive or normative ethics, which is the study of ethical theories that prescribe how people ought to act, and with meta-ethics, which is the study of what ethical terms and theories actually refer to. The following examples of questions that might be considered in each field illustrate the differences between the fields:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Applied philosophy</span> Branch of philosophy

Applied philosophy is a branch of philosophy that studies philosophical problems of practical concern. The topic covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, engineering, policy, law, politics, economics and education. The term was popularised in 1982 by the founding of the Society for Applied Philosophy by Brenda Almond, and its subsequent journal publication Journal of Applied Philosophy edited by Elizabeth Brake. Methods of applied philosophy are similar to other philosophical methods including questioning, dialectic, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation, thought experiments and logical argumentation.

In philosophy and neuroscience, neuroethics is the study of both the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. The ethics of neuroscience concerns the ethical, legal and social impact of neuroscience, including the ways in which neurotechnology can be used to predict or alter human behavior and "the implications of our mechanistic understanding of brain function for society... integrating neuroscientific knowledge with ethical and social thought".

John Edmund Hare is a British classicist, philosopher, ethicist, and currently the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University.

Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality. The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have claimed that it has important implications in the fields of descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics.

Principlism is an applied ethics approach to the examination of moral dilemmas centering the application of certain ethical principles. This approach to ethical decision-making has been prevalently adopted in various professional fields, largely because it sidesteps complex debates in moral philosophy at the theoretical level.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vojin Rakić</span>

Vojin B. Rakic is a Serbian philosopher and political scientist. He publishes in English, but also in Serbian. He has a PhD in political science from Rutgers University in the United States. He has published on ethics, bioethics, Kant, and cosmopolitan justice.

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that examines right and wrong moral behavior, moral concepts and moral language. Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior". The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value, and thus comprises the branch of philosophy called axiology.

Lee Shui-chuen is a Chinese bioethicist in the contemporary Confucian tradition of ethical thought. A professor and a former director of the Graduate Institute of Philosophy of National Central University, he received his B.A. and M.Phil. in philosophy in The Chinese University of Hong Kong under the supervision of the renowned contemporary New Confucianist professors Tang Chun-I and Mou Tsung-san. He received his PhD with the Graduate Institute of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University, US.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">S. Matthew Liao</span> Taiwanese-born American philosopher

S. Matthew Liao is an American philosopher specializing in bioethics and normative ethics. He is internationally known for his work on topics including children’s rights and human rights, novel reproductive technologies, neuroethics, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Liao currently holds the Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics, and is the Director of the Center for Bioethics and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. He has previously held appointments at Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Princeton.

References

  1. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy "Ethics"
  2. Random House Unabridged Dictionary : Entry on Axiology.
  3. Bynum, Terrell Ward. "A Very Short History of Computer Ethics". Southern Connecticut State University. Archived from the original on 2008-04-18. Retrieved 2011-01-05.