Perhaps nothing seems clearer to us and more pervasive in our lives than ethics. We live constantly with a sense of our obligations and duties, and with whether we have failed or succeeded in living up to them; and it is generally not considered bad form to remind others of their own. We are taught from our earliest ages that it is important that we “be good” or “do the right thing.” Unlike some concepts that can be difficult to understand, ethical norms seem to be readily cognizable. Indeed, we believe they need to be of such a form that virtually anyone can follow them. Of course, at the same time that we recognize how pervasive ethics is in our lives, we also recognize that there are many complicated ethical questions that do not seem to lend themselves to easy answers. Yet, for all the potential difficulty in finding some answers, we seem readily able to comprehend the nature of those difficulties in a way that would not be true of, say, a problem in theoretical physics. And although we at least sense that complicated ethical theories may occupy the time of philosophers, we also believe that philosophers are considering matters we generally understand, and which are not themselves simply products of the philosophers’ own reflections. Ethics is something real for us all, not a theoretical construct. It would still be of concern to us even if ethical theorists did not exist.

Whatever else might be said about ethics, then, its universality is palpable. We have phrased this last sentence carefully. We are saying that ethics is of concern to all of us—not that it should be, or that the world is a better place when it is, but that it is in fact of concern to all of us. The first question, therefore—and, we would venture to say, the last, as well—is simply: What is it about which we are so concerned?