Any sort of ethics textbook needs an introduction to that general area of philosophy. It turns out, however, that this sort of thing is a real bear to write. I think I could write a pretty stylin’ polemical chapter on ethics, but I’m quite sure I would lose a lot of students before I get to the business stuff. What I really want to do is set things up so that students with a wide range of views about the nature of ethics/morality will see something they recognize as relevant and so keep reading. What follows is the basic approach.
While students have a pretty good intuitive grasp of what is meant by morality or ethics (I’m not drawing any distinction - feel free to ask), it will help to make what is implicit more explicit. In that spirit, I start by noting that morality is evaluative. It concerns good and bad, right and wrong, (better and worse; optimal, acceptable, and unacceptable; required, permitted, and forbidden; etc.). These judgments are meant to be justified rather than arbitrary, and so in some sense well-grounded. Further, ethics is directive. It purports to guide people - in their behavior certainly, but arguably in attitudes, emotions, demeanor, etc. as well. Morality tells us to respond to certain situations in particular ways. Moral rules, principles, codes, etc. work sort of like mathematical functions: they take us from our situations (domain) to evaluatively appropriate reactions (range). Moral principles are supposed to be important determinants of behavior, perhaps even overriding.
While ethics is primarily a normative notion, it does have descriptive uses. Different people have different views about what principles should guide behavior (etc.). Once we have identified these candidates for normative status, we can talk about them as such, without committing to the appropriateness of any. Each of these distinct views can be understood as the prescriptions accepted by a particular individual (group, society, etc.) and so as the morality, in a descriptive sense, of that individual (group, society, etc.). Understood in this way, we can talk about the the morality of the ancient Greeks (say), without thereby signalling acceptance of the rules they considered binding. Each candidate moral function can be treated as a behavioral (attitudinal, etc.) rule that people do or don’t follow.
There are a number of ways to study morality. On the prescriptive side, we can try to more fully articulate the guidance a given moral code provides. Where an ethical view starts with a general principle, for example, we can spell out the important concepts it contains and derive subordinate principles. On the descriptive side, we can try to discover the moral codes people actually seem to follow or which codes people are willing to acknowledge explicitly. What I really want to get to, however, is philosophical ethics: examining and evaluating moral codes that are candidates for allegiance to see which, if any, are well supported. Once we see what makes sense, we can see how we might go about trying to live according to their guidance.
On what is probably the most common view, there will be some moral code or other that provides well-justified evaluations and appropriate guidance for behavior (attitude, emotion, etc.) for all or almost all people. There is even some consensus on the range of promising moral approaches. What people tend to disagree about is which of the candidate ethical views is likely to pan out.
Some thinkers, however, take a more leery approach. They claim that moral codes are not the sorts of things that can be justified, at least universally, and so moral claims are not true, right, better that alternatives, or anything of the sort, at least tout court. There are a number of ways this could be so, but to fix the idea, imagine that moral claims are expressions of attitudes: to call something “good” then is something like cheering for it; calling something “wrong” is like booing it. This sort of anti-realism about ethics would say that there are no well-justified moral principles to guide behavior.
Other thinkers who are wary about morality admit that moral codes can be justified after a fashion, but that those justifications don’t cover many individuals. Instead, different moral codes are appropriate for different groups or people (even when all face the same circumstances). The same rules don’t apply for all; acting in a certain way in certain circumstances would be wrong in one culture (say) but right in another. This sort of view goes by the name of moral relativism.
There is also a distinct view which says that the justification of moral principles depends on what those who hold them ‘bring to the table’. On this view moral evaluations are subjective in that they depend on the attitudes (desires, etc.) of agents. The same action in the same situation might be right for one person and wrong for another person depending on what these agents think about what they are doing. This is moral subjectivism.
The tradition in ethics textbooks is to direct some criticisms toward these sorts of wariness about ethics before moving on to consider the more popular moral-realist, universalist views. I plan to skip this overview. There are a number of moral theories that many people think overcome the the suspicions that ethics amounts to less than traditionally thought; if the suspicions have any force, we should see it when we look at those theories. Anti-realism, relativism, and subjectivism all have some plausibility, but it would be a mistake to start with them since they purport to debunk views we haven’t even looked at yet. It is, in particular, important to avoid easy recourse to such positions (“Who’s to say?”; “That’s just your opinion.”) because they require argument as much as any purported moral view.
