What is Ethics? Is the Law Not Enough?

Ethics is a field of philosophy that tries to sort out which actions are good or right and which are bad or wrong. We all apply ethical principles in our lives: we think that telling the truth is good, while stealing is bad, for example.

But is that even true?

If you think about it for a moment, you will probably see the problem. Telling the truth can sometimes be hurtful: you wouldn’t tell your friend that her new dress looks horrible, for example. And stealing, given the right circumstances, can be a good thing. For example, you might have the opportunity to steal a terrorist’s bomb before he can detonate it. This would certainly be an excusable kind of theft.

So if we want to find out what makes an action morally right, we have to think a little deeper.

Some say, we can just follow the law. Aren’t laws supposed to tell us how to act?

But there’s a problem with that. Can you see it? Sometimes, laws can themselves be immoral. They can either ask of us to act in unethical ways, or they can now allow us to act in ways that would actually be morally right. In short: Moral actions can sometimes be illegal. And legal actions might be immoral.

So what actions are morally right but illegal? Say, your child is injured, and you have to drive it to the hospital. It is night and the streets are empty, and you have to cross a wide, empty intersection with clear sight in all directions. The traffic light is red, and you are supposed to stop, but your child in the backseat needs urgent treatment. So you just run the red light and drive on. This is clearly illegal, but it could be seen as morally excusable.

Other actions are legally permitted, but immoral: legal tax evasion, for example. You have a huge, multinational company that declares that their headquarters are in Ireland, so that they can save on taxes. Everyone knows that this is a lie, because this is so obviously a US company. But what they do is legal, although it hurts those who rely on the tax income: the underprivileged classes who depend on state welfare, which is financed through taxes.

There are many more examples, but that’s enough for now. We can conclude that the laws cannot reliably tell us what is morally right. We need another way to measure that.

Philosophers have, over the centuries, developed different theories of what actions are morally right and wrong and why. In this post, we will discuss the four most important ones:

Utilitarianism
Kantian Ethics
Social contract theories; and
Virtue Ethics.

Originally appeared on Daily Philosophy Read More