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Ethics, the philosophical discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad and morally right and wrong. Its subject consists of fundamental issues of practical decision making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be morally evaluated.
deontological ethics, in philosophy, ethical theories that place special emphasis on the relationship between duty and the morality of human actions. The term deontology is derived from the Greek deon , “duty,” and logos , “science.”
Utilitarianism, in normative ethics, a tradition stemming from the late 18th- and 19th-century English philosophers and economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill according to which an action is right if it tends to promote happiness and wrong if it tends to produce the reverse of happiness.
ethics, Branch of philosophy that seeks to determine the correct application of moral notions such as good and bad and right and wrong or a theory of the application or nature of such notions. Ethics is traditionally subdivided into normative ethics, metaethics, and applied ethics.
teleological ethics, (teleological from Greek telos, “end”; logos, “science”), theory of morality that derives duty or moral obligation from what is good or desirable as an end to be achieved.
Ethical egoism, in philosophy, an ethical theory according to which moral decision making should be guided entirely by self-interest. Ethical egoism is often contrasted with psychological egoism, the empirical claim that advancing one’s self-interest is the underlying motive of all human action.
Kant’s claim that this idea is central to the common moral consciousness expressed, albeit in an explicit and extreme form, a tendency of Judeo-Christian ethics; it also revealed how much Western ethical consciousness had changed since the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Normative ethics, that branch of moral philosophy, or ethics, concerned with criteria of what is right and wrong. It includes the formulation of moral rules that have implications for what human actions, institutions, and ways of life should be like. It is usually contrasted with theoretical ethics and applied ethics.
Ethics of care, feminist philosophical perspective that uses a relational and context-bound approach toward morality and decision making. The term ethics of care refers to ideas concerning both the nature of morality and normative ethical theory.
Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (1874) is the most detailed and subtle work of utilitarian ethics yet produced. Especially noteworthy is his discussion of the various principles of what he calls common sense morality—i.e., the morality accepted, without systematic thought, by most people.