moral philosophy

• Epistemology


  The study of knowledge and justified belief
• Normative Ethical Theories


  • Utilitarianism
  • Kantian deontological ethics
  • Aristotelian virtue ethics
• Utilitarianism


  The question of what is meant by 'utility' and 'maximising utility'
• Jeremy Bentham's quantitative hedonistic utilitarianism


  • His utility calculus
• John Stuart Mill's qualitative hedonistic utilitarianism

  • Higher and lower pleasures
  • His 'proof' of the greatest happiness principle
• Non-hedonistic utilitarianism


  • Including preference utilitarianism
• Act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism

  • Issues, including:
  • Whether pleasure is the only good (Nozick's experience machine)
  • Fairness and individual liberty/rights (including the risk of the 'tyranny of the majority')
  • Problems with calculation (including which beings to include)
  • Issues around partiality
  • Whether utilitarianism ignores both the moral integrity and the intentions of the individual
• Kantian deontological ethics


  • Immanuel Kant's account of what is meant by a 'good will'
  • The distinction between acting in accordance with duty and acting out of duty
  • The distinction between hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives
  • The first formulation of the categorical imperative (including the distinction between a contradiction in conception and a contradiction in will)
  • The second formulation of the categorical imperative
• Kantian deontological ethics


  • Issues, including:
  • Clashing/competing duties
  • Not all universalisable maxims are distinctly moral; not all non-universalisable maxims are immoral
  • The view that consequences of actions determine their moral value
  • Kant ignores the value of certain motives, eg love, friendship, kindness
  • Morality is a system of hypothetical, rather than categorical, imperatives (Philippa Foot)
• Aristotelian virtue ethics


  • 'The good' for human beings: the meaning of Eudaimonia as the 'final end' and the relationship between Eudaimonia and pleasure
  • The function argument and the relationship between virtues and function
  • Aristotle's account of virtues and vices: virtues as character traits/dispositions; the role of education/habituation in the development of a moral character; the skill analogy; the importance of feelings; the doctrine of the mean and its application to particular virtues
  • Moral responsibility: voluntary, involuntary and non-voluntary actions
  • The relationship between virtues, actions and reasons and the role of practical reasoning/practical wisdom
• Aristotelian virtue ethics


  • Issues, including:
  • Whether Aristotelian virtue ethics can give sufficiently clear guidance about how to act
  • Clashing/competing virtues
  • The possibility of circularity involved in defining virtuous acts and virtuous persons in terms of each other
  • Whether a trait must contribute to Eudaimonia in order to be a virtue; the relationship between the good for the individual and moral good
• Applied ethics issues


  • Stealing
  • Simulated killing (within computer games, plays, films etc)
  • Eating animals
  • Telling lies