University of Kansas, Fall 2002
Philosophy 672: History of Ethics
Ben Eggleston

Class notes: introduction

The following notes correspond roughly to what we cover, including at least a portion of what I put on the board or the screen, in class. In places they may be more or less comprehensive than what we actually cover in class, and should not be taken as a substitute for your own observations and records of what goes on in class.

The following outline is designed to be, and is in some Web browsers, collapsible: by clicking on the heading for a section, you can collapse that section or, if it’s already collapsed, make it expanded again. If you want to print some but not all of this outline, collapse the parts you don’t want to print (so that just their top-level headings remain), and then click here to print this frame.

  1. three sub-fields within ethics
    1. applied ethics: the branch of ethics devoted to the study of specific ethical issues, such as whether cloning is all right or whether we are morally obliged to treat animals better than we do. Sometimes this branch of ethics is associated with the idea of “case studies.”
    2. normative ethics: the branch of ethics devoted (mostly) to the development of moral theories: theories that specify, in brief and general terms, what actions, policies, institutions, etc., are morally acceptable. Within normative ethics, there are three main theoretical traditions:
      1. virtue ethics
      2. deontological ethics (emphasizing duties and rules)
      3. consequentialist ethics (emphasizing outcomes rather than how they happen to come about)
    3. meta-ethics: the branch of ethics devoted to explaining what we are doing when we make moral judgments or engage in moral debates. Meta-ethicists try to give accounts of such things as the meaning of moral terms and the grounds of moral judgments.
  2. the orientation of the works we’ll study
    1. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (fourth century B.C.) is the seminal work of virtue ethics.
    2. Hume’s An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) is essentially meta-ethical (but with consequentialist normative-ethical leanings).
    3. Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) is deontological.
    4. Mill’s Utilitarianism (1861) is consequentialist.
  3. Before you start reading Mill, there is one thing that it helps to be aware of, and that is Mill’s main target in Utilitarianism, or what Mill is most concerned to argue against.
    1. To be sure, Mill is aware of deontological theories and virtue-ethical theories, and is trying to present a theory that will outdo these. But Mill has another, more immediate target, and that is the approach to ethics sometimes known as intuitionism. The core idea of this approach is that you don’t need an elaborate theory (or any theory at all!) in order to reach correct moral judgments; on the contrary, ordinary people can reach correct moral judgments by just getting the facts of particular cases in view and then thinking in a focused and dispassionate way about the moral features of those cases; and many intuitionists also maintain that ordinary people can come up with correct moral rules, such as perhaps “Never break a promise except in an emergency,” in the same way—that is, with just some sincere reflection on the merits of the rule. So whether it’s a matter of particular cases or general principles, the intuitionist approach is basically, “Trust your conscience.” This approach is Mill’s most immediate target as he explains and argues for his utilitarianism.
    2. If you’ve read On Liberty, or are otherwise familiar with the view Mill expresses there, then you can connect this aim of Mill’s (just described) with his awareness of, and apathy towards, the tyranny of the majority. Mill felt that English society in the middle of the nineteenth century was dominated by strict customs (this was the Victorian era, after all), and that the widespread use of intuitionism as an approach to ethics was part of the cause of this, because it made majorities feel perfectly entitled to impose their view on minorities. The more people who would see morality in utilitarian terms rather than intuitionist terms, Mill thought, the better it would be for individual liberty and social progress.