University of Kansas, Fall 2003
Philosophy 672: History of Ethics
Ben Eggleston—eggleston@ku.edu

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.

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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 ought 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 (emphasizing character traits)
      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 A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) 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. mechanics of the course
   1. requirements: test or paper on each author (16 percent), final exam (24 percent), class participation (12 percent)
   2. web site: syllabus, notes, assignments