Three Areas of Study

1. Normative ethics is concerned with theories which tell you what's right and wrong, and why. For example:
   • consequentialism says that happiness is good and pain is bad, therefore you do good by increasing happiness, and bad by increasing unhappiness (see Mill).
   • deontology says that you do good by fulfilling certain obligations or duties, because, e.g. it's rational to do so (see Kant).
   • virtue ethics says that to be good you need to develop a set of character traits, and by doing so you will become a properly fulfilled person (see Aristotle).
   Normative ethics don't attempt to be descriptive; they don't describe how people behave, but tell you how you ought to behave.
2. Meta-ethics attempts to explain what it is to make a judgement about what is good and what is bad; to what extent can moral judgements be "correct"? Does an action have a property of "rightness"?
3. Applied ethics attempts to apply ethical theories to real-world problems, and to deal with issues such as abortion/war/gay marriage, etc..

Moral theories offer

• A theory of the good describes what things/states of affairs are good, and what makes them good.
• A theory of the right tells you which actions are the right actions to perform

We do have opinions about moral matters and situations, and make moral judgements in everyday life, so morality affects our behaviour. Some philosophers think that there is no point in taking this any further: morality is inescapably practical, and there's no point in trying to analyse it since that just distorts our moral practice. Jamieson though, points out that moral theorising is inescapably linked to practicee: we find that we ask ourselves "am I justified in doing X/having view Y?". This "stepping back" suggests that we are checking the internal coherence of our moral views and our behaviour. The fact that we attempt this systemisation of our moral judgements seems to be reason to formalise morality by developing a moral theory.

A moral theory could be based on foundationalist or coherentist principles; problems with both approaches though, as per other branches of epistemology.

Consequentialism

Consequentialism regards certain states of affairs as good (a foundationalist approach), and therefore sees that actions which bring about those states of affairs are morally good actions. Utilitarianism is a type of consequentialism which regards happiness as good, pain as bad. Good actions are therefore those which increase overall happiness; bad actions reduce overall happiness.

By contrasting consequentialism with other theories, it's possible to highlight some of the aspects which make it distinctive:

• virtue ethics might say that it is artificial to separate good/right; we don't actually think in this way
• deontologist might say that an act being right doesn't have to depend on its consequences
• it could be argued that while actions that produce good effects are right, they are still subject to certain constraints. For example, killing someone may be regarded as wrong, even if by so doing we could save many lives
• A pure consequentialist view might hold that if lying is bad, then for me to tell a lie is a good thing, if by so doing I can reduce the total number of lies told. But against this it could be argued that the morally important thing is for me not to lie, regardless of whether that might result in more lies being told overall.

Forms of Consequentialism

• A direct theory of the right would say that morally right actions are those which maximise the good
• An indirect theory of the right says that actions are right if they follow rules or motives which themselves maximise the good. For example, don't tell lies, because lying generally speaking makes things worse
• A collective theory of the right says that the right actions are those which would maximise the good if everyone else in the same position performed the same actions. This might be applied in the case e.g. of giving money to famine relief.
• Rule consequentialism holds that the right actions are those which comply with rules that would maximise the good if everyone followed them (i.e. this is a combination of indirect/collective).