Ethics

What does it mean to form a human being? Few questions run through the history of philosophy with such persistence — and few have consequences so immediate for the life of every person and every society. Is educating a matter of leading someone out of ignorance, or of helping them develop what they already carry within? Is it shaping character according to a model, or freeing a capacity to judge for oneself? This article traces the main philosophical answers to these questions, from Greek paideia to contemporary pedagogies, passing through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Comenius, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Dewey, and Freire. ...

In a world where good actions produce disastrous results and base actions yield prosperity, what can still be called good without qualification? Immanuel Kant answered that question with a clarity that has unsettled moral philosophy for more than two centuries: only the good will deserves to be called an unconditioned good. Not talent, not courage, not even happiness — for all of these can be turned toward wicked ends. Only the will that acts out of pure respect for the moral law, independently of its consequences, possesses moral worth in itself. From this inaugural insight, Kant constructed, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the most ambitious and most contested ethical architecture of modernity. ...

You have made a promise you cannot keep without harming a third party. Should you honor it, or break it to prevent the harm? A judge knows that convicting an innocent person will calm a crowd that would otherwise riot and kill twenty people. Should he sacrifice the innocent one? There is no easy answer — and it is precisely that discomfort which reveals why moral philosophy needs theories. There are three great families of response to the question “what makes an action morally right?”: consequentialism, which looks to outcomes; deontology, which looks to duties and rules; and virtue ethics, which looks to the character of the agent. Understanding how each thinks, where each succeeds, and where each stumbles is the minimum map for any serious ethical debate. ...

A runaway trolley is hurtling toward five people tied to the track. You are standing beside a lever that can divert it onto a side track — where there is only one person. Pull the lever? Most people say yes. Now a different scene: there is no lever, but you are on a footbridge beside a large man; pushing him onto the track would stop the trolley and save the five. Most people, now, refuse. Why is five-for-one acceptable in one case and repugnant in the other, if the arithmetic is the same? This is the most famous form of the trolley problem — perhaps the best-known thought experiment in ethics. ...

Few moral theories have been as influential — and as attacked — as utilitarianism. Its central idea is disarmingly simple: the right action is the one that produces the greatest amount of well-being for the greatest number of those affected. Born as a reforming philosophy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, it shaped criminal law, welfare economics, public policy and, more recently, animal ethics and the fight against global poverty. This article lays out its structure, its main authors, and the objections that dog it. ...

Few questions are as immediate and as difficult as this one: does life have a meaning? It can erupt in a sleepless night, in grief, or in the tedium of a routine, and it challenges believer and skeptic alike. Though ancient in substance — it runs through Ecclesiastes, the Stoics, and Augustine — it became an explicit and technically worked topic of philosophy only recently. This article surveys its main formulations: the crisis of cosmic meaning, pessimism, Camus’s absurd, Nagel’s ironic response, and the analytic turn that distinguishes the meaning of life from meaning in life. ...

What is a good life? Not a pleasant life, nor a life successful in the eyes of others, but a life truly fulfilled, worthy of what we are. Aristotle’s answer to that question, set out in the Nicomachean Ethics, is among the most influential in history — and, after centuries of relative eclipse before the moralities of duty and of consequence-calculation, it has returned to the center of contemporary philosophical debate under the name “virtue ethics.” This article traces the core of that ethics: eudaimonia as the final end, virtue as habit and as a mean, practical wisdom, and friendship. For Aristotle’s metaphysics, see the article on substance; for his theory of justice, the article on justice. ...

Imagine that all of Western philosophy, from Parmenides to Heidegger, had committed the same fundamental gesture: reducing what is different to what is identical, absorbing the strange into the familiar, converting the Other into an object of my knowledge. This is the charge that runs through the work of Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995). Against a tradition that made the question of being its supreme concern, Lévinas asserts something apparently simple and radically subversive: prior to ontology there is ethics. Before I understand the world, I am already bound by a face that looks at me and says “thou shalt not kill.” ...

For decades, philosophy textbooks treated Simone de Beauvoir as an appendix to Jean-Paul Sartre — the gifted companion who applied to the “woman question” ideas that were supposedly not her own. That reading is tenacious, but recent scholarship contests it: Beauvoir was an original philosopher whose contributions to existentialist ethics and to the theory of oppression anticipate, on decisive points, formulations later credited to Sartre. And it was she, not he, who produced the work that would give twentieth-century feminism its philosophical foundation. To read Beauvoir as a thinker in her own right is not a gesture of historiographical courtesy: it is a demand of rigor. ...

A Silent Moral Revolution In 1975, Australian philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation — a book that would become one of the philosophically most practically impactful texts of the twentieth century, giving decisive impetus to the animal rights movement and motivating legislative changes in several countries. The central thesis is at once simple and radical: the exclusion of non-human animals from full moral consideration has no rational justification — it is a form of prejudice comparable to racism and sexism. ...

The Birth of a Field The term bioethics was coined by oncologist and biochemist Van Rensselaer Potter in 1971, in his book Bioethics: Bridge to the Future. For Potter, bioethics was a synthetic discipline bridging the biological sciences and human values — a “bridge” capable of guiding humanity in the face of risks that technological progress posed to the survival of the species and the ecosystem. Potter conceived bioethics broadly, in an almost environmental sense, encompassing the relationship between human beings and the entire biosphere. ...

The Problem of Ethics in the Technological Age Philosophical ethics, from the Greeks to Kant, was elaborated for a world of limited human reach. Human actions affected the immediate surroundings — the polis, the family, one’s contemporaries. The distant future and non-human nature remained outside the scope of moral consideration: they were domains of theology, cosmology, or simply immutable givens of the setting in which ethics operated. The technological development of the twentieth century radically altered this picture. The human capacity for action — to transform, destroy, and create — acquired planetary scale and a temporal reach extending across generations. The atomic bomb, genetic engineering, global ecological degradation: these realities pose ethical problems that available traditions were simply never designed to address. ...

Technology and Ethics: An Old Relationship, A New Problem Ethical concern about technological power is not new. In the twentieth century, Norbert Wiener — MIT mathematician and founder of cybernetics — devoted the book The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) to reflecting on the moral and social implications of automated machines. Wiener warned of the risks of systems that, once in operation, produce consequences independent of their creators’ original intentions, and of the possibility that automation would generate mass unemployment and concentration of power. ...

The Problem Suppose every thought you have, every decision you make, every movement of your body is the necessary result of prior brain states — which in turn result from prior physical states, in a chain stretching back to the Big Bang. If that is true, in what sense are you free to do otherwise than you do? And if you are not free, how can you be held morally responsible for your actions? ...

There is a philosopher who, writing in Latin in a small house in The Hague in the seventeenth century, formulated one of the most radical worldviews Western philosophy has ever produced — and did so in the unlikely form of a treatise of geometry. That philosopher is Baruch (Bento) Spinoza (1632–1677), and the treatise is the Ethics demonstrated in geometrical order, published posthumously in the year of his death. In a little over two hundred pages, organized into definitions, axioms, propositions, and demonstrations, Spinoza proposes simultaneously a metaphysics of the absolute, a theory of human affects, a psychology of knowledge, and an ethics of freedom. His influence runs across three centuries — Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Antonio Damasio — and his name still functions, in the history of philosophy, as a cipher for an intellectual decision: thinking God, nature, and the human being as expressions of a single reality. ...

There are three names that every history of Western philosophy is bound to utter in this order: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The sequence is not arbitrary. It is a chain of direct transmission — Socrates was Plato’s teacher; Plato was Aristotle’s teacher — which, in little more than a century, turned Athens into the centre of rational thought in the ancient world and fixed the problems, the methods and the vocabulary that philosophy would use for the next two thousand years. ...

Among all the philosophical schools of Antiquity, none exercised so prolonged and so diverse an influence as Stoicism. Founded in Athens around 300 BCE by Zeno of Citium, Stoicism spanned five centuries, shaped Roman law, infiltrated early Christianity, and resurfaced powerfully in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and — more recently — in cognitive-behavioral therapy and philosophical self-help movements. The reason for this longevity is simple: Stoicism offers a coherent and practicable answer to the most urgent question of human existence — how to live well in a world we do not control. ...

Introduction: What Is Autonomy? Few philosophical concepts span as many domains — moral, political, existential, legal, medical — as autonomy. The word derives from the Greek autós (self) and nómos (law, rule): to govern oneself, to give oneself one’s own law. In ancient Greece, the term originally designated the condition of póleis that governed themselves by their own laws, free from subjection to a foreign power. An autonomous city was one that exercised sovereignty over its internal organization. ...

Few philosophical distinctions are as revealing as the one the Greeks drew between bíos (βίος) and zoé (ζωή). The first designates qualified life — the way someone chooses to live, the ethical and political profile of an existence; the second indicates the bare fact of being alive, the biological life shared by all animate beings. This seemingly terminological difference carries one of philosophy’s deepest questions: what does it mean to live well? ...

Of all the answers that philosophy has offered to the question “what is the good?”, few have been as intuitive — or as widely misunderstood — as that of hedonism: pleasure is the supreme good. In everyday usage the word conjures images of excess and indulgence, Roman banquets and moral abandon. But philosophical hedonism is something else entirely: a millennia-old ethical tradition that begins with Aristippus of Cyrene in the fifth century BCE, reaches its most refined form in Epicurus, and re-emerges in modernity as the cornerstone of Bentham’s and Mill’s utilitarianism. ...