Does it matter who actually writes the term paper you turn in and represent as your own?
Does it matter whether the state executes a criminal who has the mental capacity of a ten- year-old? Does it matter who actually writes the term paper you turn in and represent as your own? Does it matter whether we can easily save a drown- ing child but casually decide not to? Does it matter whether young girls in Africa undergo painful
Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the philosoph- ical study of morality. Morality refers to beliefs concerning right and wrong, good and bad— beliefs that can include judgments, values, rules, principles, and theories. They help guide our actions, define our values, and give us reasons for being the persons we are. (Ethical and moral, the adjective forms, are often used to mean simply “having to do with morality,” and ethics and morality are sometimes used to refer to the moral norms of a specific group or individual, as in “Greek ethics” or “Russell’s morality.”) Ethics, then, addresses the powerful question that Socrates for- mulated twenty-four hundred years ago: how ought we to live?
The scope and continued relevance of this query suggest something compelling about ethics: you cannot escape it. You cannot run away from all the choices, feelings, and actions that accom- pany ideas about right and wrong, good and bad— ideas that persist in your culture and in your mind. After all, for much of your life, you have been assimilating, modifying, or rejecting the eth- ical norms you inherited from your family, com- munity, and society. Unless you are very unusual, from time to time you deliberate about the right- ness or wrongness of actions, embrace or reject particular moral principles or codes, judge the goodness of your character or intentions (or some- one else’s), perhaps even question (and agonize over) the soundness of your own moral outlook when it conflicts with that of others. In other words, you are involved in ethics—you do ethics.