PP110 Lecture Notes - Normative Ethics, Deontological Ethics, Applied Ethics
Document Summary
Ethics the philosophical sub-discipline, which examines morality. meta-ethics (applies philosophical scrutiny to a part of philosophy) Normative ethics (right/wrong), applied ethics (how norms ought to be applied), We must make difficult, but important, moral choices. We cannot simply say, let"s just accept that capital punishment is wrong for you and acceptable for me. In order to provide an explanation of our moral claims, we need a conceptual framework: a theory that allows us to make sense of them. An ethical theory provides us with grounds to support our moral claims. Without such a theory, we cannot justify why we think some particular action, for example, is right or wrong. Often, moral statements can be rephrased in terms of how things should or ought to be. Example: in asserting that it is wrong to steal, we might instead say, without loss of meaning, that one ought not to steal.
