This chapter introduces some major ethical theories and principles and explores the relationship between ethical ideas and dominant belief systems or ideologies. It begins to show how currently dominant ideologies shape ethical thinking and decision making.

Ethics

Ethics is a branch of philosophy concerned with serious consideration, clarification and rational assessment of moral ideas and moral decision making. This inevitably involves abstraction and isolation of moral ideas from their ‘real world’ contexts, where they exist as elements of complex systems of belief and forms of life, along with idealisation and logical development of such ideas. While this helps in understanding the ethical dimension of all ideologies, and encouraging individual recognition and reassessment of previously taken-for-granted moral ideas, it can also function to obscure the details of specific belief systems or ideologies which actually shape real-world moral decision making.

Ethicists have sought to clarify the key features of specifically moral thought and action. In particular, they have distinguished moral judgments of the rightness or wrongness of particular actions from legal, aesthetic or prudential judgments. Rather than being concernedwith principles of law, of taste, or of individual well-being, moral judgments depend upon specifically moral standards – of value, virtue and obligation, of ultimate or intrinsic worth, of what we ought, or should, or are obliged to do, without condition; of the rights and well-being of others, ultimately of all humans or of all sentient life, rather than pure self-interest.