This Is Philosophy: Ethics 2

Quality of pleasure

The density of pleasure per unit of delivery.

Supererogation

The property of a good action that is greater than what duty requires.

Hedonism

The thesis that the highest good is pleasure.

Agent-neutral moral theory

A moral theory according to which everyone has the same duties and moral aims, no matter what their personal interests or interpersonal relationships.

Agent-relative moral theory

A moral theory according to which our interpersonal relationships can impose particular moral obligations that we do not have to all others.

Utilitarianism

A moral theory that is the conjunction of consequentialism and a theory of the highest good.

Simpson's paradox

A statistical oddity that arises when a set can be partitioned into subsets that each have a property opposite to that of the superset.

Consequentialism

A theory about the structure of morality according to which all that morally matters is the consequences of action.

Felicific calculus

Jeremy Bentham's proposed method of measuring pains and pleasures in terms of their intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and extent.

Summum bonum

Latin for "the highest good"

Virtue ethics

The moral theory that the good life consists in cultivating and having a virtuous character.

Deontology

The moral theory proposed by Immanuel Kant, according to which there is an absolute moral law expressed by the categorical imperative. Deontology is the basis for the theory of rights.

Categorical imperative (version 1)

You should act only according to those principles of action that you could will to be a universal law of nature.

Categorical imperative (version 2)

You should treat other people as ends in themselves and never merely as means to your own ends.