PHIL 100 Lecture Notes - Brooks Brothers, Practical Ethics, Normative Ethics
17 Sep 2013
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Ethics is not an inquiry into what we ought to believe about the world, but, rather, an inquiry into what we ought to do. There are two major branches within ethics proper. In normative ethics we strive to come up with general principles that dictate for all possible scenarios what we morally ought to do in those scenarios. In practical ethics (or applied ethics) we examine particular ethical issues and try to figure out hat we morally ought to do respect to them. Two particular issues: our moral obligations to those in desperate need, our moral obligations to non-human animals. An action, x, is morally permissible if and only if it is morally ok (or morally allowed, or morally all right , etc. ) to perform x: we can define many other moral concepts in terms of moral permissibility. An action, x is morally impermissible = it would not be morally permissible to perform.
