Theorists

Hobbes

"...right...that liberty which every man hath to make use of his natural faculties according to right reason."

Kant

"...two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe...the starry heavens above and the moral law within."

Hume

"...virtue [is] whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation."

Mackie

"If we are people of the sort that we need to be, and that we want to be, we cannot be callous and indifferent, let alone actively cruel, either towards permanently defective human beings or towards non-human animals."

Ross

Rightness is a distinct, indefinable characteristic of acts, that is generally independent of whatever good may result from their occurrence, and statements about the acts being morally right are self-evidently true.

Aquinas

Acts are good or evil in accordance with their foreseeable consequences.

Hume

"...reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions."

Marx

Capitalism creates divisiveness among individuals by creating classes of labor.

Existentialism

Freedom refers to the condition of human existence rather than a characteristic of human nature.

A Baier

Reliance depends on the psychological assessment of the other person's attitudes, habits, and so on, whereas trust requires recognition of another individual's good will.

Sidgwick

Three evident methods of common sense: intuitive, egoistic, and utilitarian.

Spinoza

Virtue is obedience to reason.

Ethical theorists

have a deliberative function, while maintaining an interest in the regulative and normative.

Hume

"...Personal Merit consists altogether in the possession of mental qualities, useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others who have any intercourse with him."

Sartre

"...a man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, ... he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which make up these undertakings."

Aristotle

"...a master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate and chooses this--the intermediate not in the object but relative to us."

Aquinas

"...all things are directed to the highest good, namely God, as their end."

Moralities

"...are systems of principles whose acceptance by everyone as overruling the dictates of self-interest is in the interest of everyone alike, though following the rules of a morality is not of course identical with following self-interest."

Spinoza

"...every man, according to his emotions, judges a thing to be good or bad, useful or useless."

Aristotle

"...for man, therefore, the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest."

Sartre

"...in creating the man we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be."

Epictetus

"...in the will alone is vice: in the will alone is virtue."

Kierkegaard

"...it is only in subjectivity that its truth exists, if it exists at all; objectively, Christianity has absolutely no existence."

Epictetus

"...logic is necessary, since without its assistance you cannot so much as know whether it is necessary or not."

Aquinas

"...man has a natural inclination to know the truth about God, and to live in society; and in this respect, whatever pertains to this inclination belongs to the natural law."

Aquinas

"...man's ultimate happiness consists solely in the contemplation of God."

Aquinas

"...natural law is nothing else than the rational creature's participation of the eternal law."

Spinoza

"...our highest happiness and blessedness is...solely in the knowledge of God, whereby we are led to act only as love and piety shall bid us."

K Baier

"...outside society, the very distinction between right and wrong vanishes."

Bentham

"...the Public Good ought to be the object of the legislator: General Utility ought to be the foundation of his reasonings. To know the true good of the community is what constitutes the science of legislation; the art consists in finding the means to realize that good."

Aquinas

"...the good and the end are the proper object of the will; and therefore whatever proceeds from a will must needs be directed to an end."

Hobbes

"...the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short..."

Butler

"...the nature of man, as consisting partly of various appetites, passions, affections, and partly of the principle of reflection or conscience;...there is this natural superiority of one inward principle to another."

Hume

"...the rules of equity or justice depend entirely on the particular state and condition in which men are placed, and owe their origin and existence to that utility, which results to the public from their strict and regular observance."

Kierkegaard

"...the truly ethical person has an inner serenity and sense of security, for he does not have duty outside himself but within himself."

Aristotle

"...we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts."

Epicurus

"...we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life. For we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good."

Hobbes

"A commonwealth is said to be instituted when a multitude of men do agree, and covenant, every one, with everyone, that to whatsoever man, or assembly of men, shall be given by the major part, the right to present the person of them all, that is to say, to be their representative; everyone, as well he that voted for it, as he that voted against it, shall authorize all the actions and judgments, of that man, or assembly of men, in the same manner, as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves, and be protected against other men."

Nietzsche

"According to slave-morality, therefore, the 'evil' man arouses fear; according to master-morality, it is precisely the 'good' man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being."

Spinoza

"All things...are in God, and all things which come to pass, come to pass solely through the laws of the infinite nature of God, and follow...from the necessity of his essence."

Kierkegaard

"Anything that is almost probable, or probable, or extremely and emphatically probable, is something he can almost know, or as good as know, or extremely and emphatically almost know--but it is impossible to believe."

Mill

"As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."

Marx

"As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production."

Kierkegaard

"As soon as the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins, and only by acknowledging this can he be reconciled again with the universal."

Epictetus

"Chastise your passions that they may not chastise you.... It belongs to a wise man to resist pleasure; and to a fool to be enslaved by it."

Butler

"Conscience does not only offer itself to show us the way we should walk in, but it likewise carries its own authority with it, that it is our natural guide; the guide assigned us by the Author of our nature: it therefore belongs to our condition of being, it is our duty to walk in that path, and follow this guide, without looking about to see whether we may not possible forsake them with impunity."

Hobbes

"Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyself."

Rawls

"Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.... Therefore . . . the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests."

Problem of evil

"Either God would remove evil out of this world, and cannot: or He can, and will not; or, He has not the power nor will; or, lastly, He has both the power and will.... If He be both willing and able...whence comes evil, or why does He not prevent it?"

Kierkegaard

"Every human being, no matter how slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and of its purpose."

Plato

"Everything in the universe has a purpose or proper function within a harmonious hierarchy of purposes."

Augustine

"God accomplishes some of His purposes, which of course are all good, through the evil desires of wicked men."

Moore

"Good" is indefinable. It refers to a simple property of things--it is a primitive and irreducible quality that although good itself cannot be defined, all other ethical terms can be defined through it.

Kant

"I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law."

Kierkegaard

"If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty."

Kant

"If now the action is good only as a means to something else, then the imperative is hypothetical; if it is conceived as good in itself and consequently as being necessarily the principle of a will which of itself conforms to reason, then it is categorical."

Plato

"In the world of knowledge [the Good] appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual, and this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed." "Everything in the universe has a purpose or proper function within a harmonious hierarchy of purposes."

Rawls

"Justice is a complex of three ideas liberty, equality, and reward for services contributing to the common good."

Mackie

"Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take."

Hobbes

"Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit."

Epicurus

"Of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship."

Ross

"Prima facie duty" is the kind of act that has the characteristic of generating moral claims. Some prima facie duties have a greater claim on us than others.

Kant

"So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only."

Nietzsche

"The history of philosophy is the story of a secret and mad hatred of the prerequisites of Life, of the feelings which make for the real values of Life, and of all partisanship in favor of Life."

Mill

"The ultimate sanction...of all morality...being a subjective feeling in our own minds [conscience]."

Sidgwick

"There are certain absolute practical principles, the truth of which, when they are explicitly stated, is manifest; but they are of too abstract a nature, and too universal in their scope, to enable us to ascertain by immediate application of them what we ought to do in any particular case; particular duties have still to be determined by some other method."

Hobbes

"These rules of propriety,...and of good, evil, lawful, and unlawful in the actions of subjects, are the civil laws; that is to say, the laws of each commonwealth in particular."

Epictetus

"This is the part of philosophy, to examine, and fix the rules; and to make use of them, when they are known, is the business of a wise and good man."

Kant

"To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love."

A Baier

"Trust alters power positions, and both the position one is in without a given form of trust and the position one has within a relation of trust need to be considered before one can judge whether that form of trust is sensible and morally decent."

A Baier

"Trust is letting other persons take care of something the truster cares about, where such 'caring for' involves some exercise of discretionary powers."

Aquinas

"Virtue is a habit through which men wish for good things. But a good will is one which is in accordance with virtue."

Kierkegaard

"What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know.... The crucial thing is to find a truth which is a truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live or die."

K Baier

"What course of action is supported by the best reasons?"

Epictetus

"Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion.... Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office...."

Kierkegaard

"[Faith is the paradox that] it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute."

Nietzsche

"[H]ow could there be a 'common good'! The expression contradicts itself; that which can be common is always of small value."

Mackie

"[I]t is necessary for the well-being of people in general that they should act to some extent in ways that they cannot see to be (egoistically) prudential and also in ways that in fact are not prudential. Morality has the function of checking what would be the natural result of prudence alone."

Butler

"[Our Maker] intended we should be instruments of good to each other, as well as that we should be so to ourselves."

Mill

"[T]he Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.... It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others."

Spinoza

"[The strong man] strives before all things to conceive things as they really are, and to remove the hindrances to true knowledge, such as ... hatred, anger, envy, derision, pride, and similar emotions."

Prescriptivists

...analyze the role that moral judgments play in our quest for solutions to concrete and vital moral problems.

Prescriptivists

...emphasize the directive or guiding function of moral judgments in arriving at moral decisions.

Hume

...nothing is present to the mind except its perceptions, which are either sense impressions or ideas based on sense impressions; hence all knowledge consists in judgments about either matters of fact or relations between ideas.

Logical positivist

...propose that philosophers leave the discovery of facts to the scientists and devote themselves exclusively to the analysis and improvement of the language used to communicate facts.

Hume

...we judge acts generally by their conformity to social utility, rather than by immediate, personal preferences,...impartiality prevails when we make moral judgments.

Kant

1. An act must be done from duty in order to have inner moral worth. 2. An act done from duty derives its moral value not from the results it produces but from the principle by which it is determined.

Kant

A good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being worthy of happiness. A good will is one that acts for the sake of duty alone. Actions have inner moral worth only if they are performed solely from duty.

Plato

A just individual is one in whom reason, emotion, and desire are balanced harmoniously.

Kant

A valid moral principle must be a priori--independent of the empirical data of morality.

Marx

Alienation is where human beings become mere objects when the product of their labor is no longer theirs and when their activities are controlled by others.

Dewey

An ethical theory should involve nothing less than the problem of the directed reconstruction of economic, political and religious institutions. The conception of what is good must undergo change as society changes and as knowledge of the physical environment increases.

Dewey

Applying experimental methods to ethics would lead to a change in perspective from the past to the future and a change of emphasis from the subjective to the objective, recognizing that all standards, principles, and rules are intellectual instruments to be tested and confirmed.

Butler

Benevolence is when people control their appetites to further the public good.

Butler

Conscience is the regulative principle that resolves conflicts between personal and social interests. Its authority is self-evident, with no appeal to any higher principle.

Problem of choice

Divine foreknowledge must be reconciled with our freedom to choose good or evil.

Existentialism

Do individuals have the courage to live authentically--to live according to choices made consciously and responsibly?

Ross

Duties of fidelity or reparation rest on previous acts such as a promise. Other duties include duties of gratitude, justice, beneficence, self-improvement, nonmaleficience.

A Baier

Equality of power and separateness from others is alien to women's experience of life and morality.

Ross

Ethical assessments of an action depend partly on its consequences, and partly on other features such as promise-keeping and truth-telling.

Stevenson

Ethical inquiry must be extended to include an examination of the role of emotive expressions in ethical disputes, as ethical arguments involve both factual and value elements.

Mackie

Ethical judgments are not about objective facts, but even though they are not objective, there is every reason to take them seriously.

Moore

Ethical realism is the doctrine that there are ethical properties that exist independently of human consciousness.

Greek ethical tradition

Ethics is primarily concerned with the "good life" and discovering the nature of happiness.

Moore

Ethics is the general enquiry into what is good, not confined to "conduct" or "practice".

Hobbes

Evaluating objects or actions as good or evil depends on no other basis than desires, that which moves one to pursue objects, and aversions, that which moves one to avoid objects. Both are endeavors, mental phenomena similar to physiological motions.

Nietzsche

Exploitation is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life.

Kierkegaard

Father of existentialism--the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject--the acting, feeling, living human individual. Often, the individual's starting point is characterized by the existential attitude, or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.

Ross

If an act is optimific as well as right, that is interesting but not morally important; if not, we still ought to do them (they are right acts), and the question whether they are optimific has no importance for moral theory.

Marx

In Hegel, human history reflects the succession of dialectically related stages in the self-realization of Absolute Spirit. Another approach is to see human history as reflecting the succession of dialectically related stages in the evolution of the material (economic) environment.

K Baier

In a choice between two alternative worlds, one in which moral reasons are always treated by everyone as superior to reasons of self-interest and one in which the reverse is the practice, the first world is the better world and the second is similar to a Hobbesian state of nature.

K Baier

In general, moral reasons trump selfish reasons which trump reasons of immediate pleasure.

Mill

Individual psychological hedonism, where the sole motive of an action is an individual's desire for happiness, is primarily a descriptive doctrine, purporting to be an account of the actual motive of behavior.

Kierkegaard

Institutions based on self-serving presumptions about human beings in the abstract tend to transform actual men and women into anonymous conformists.

Aristotle

Intelligent conduct is the union of true knowledge of what we ought to do and the desire to do it.

Sartre

It is as self-deceptive for human beings to escape the burden of responsibility for their actions through an appeal to supernatural belief as it is to avoid responsibility by claiming that one's actions fall under natural laws.

A Baier

Male philosophers have focused on explicit promises that create obligations among equals, while women are unable to ignore the virtues and vices of unequal relationships such as family, male/female, parent/child, etc.

Existentialism

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

Marx

Moral ideas and standards, though falsely believed by traditional moral philosophers to be products of pure reason, are also conditioned by the "material (economic) conditions of life.

Williams

Morality is the kind of philosophical grounding that cannot be supplied for norms and standards. Ethics is the intellectual project of developing and thinking about norms and standards.

Nietzsche

Nature is essentially the will to power, a brutal and savage contest of strength, characterized by frightfulness and tragedy, bloodshed, suffering, and cruelty. Affirming the values that enhance the will to power, saying "yea" to life as it actually is, constitutes for Nietzsche the true morality.

Foot

Only those beliefs that are necessarily connected with human welfare are moral beliefs.

Nietzsche

Organizations as well, "will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavor to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendency--not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely Will to Power.

Spinoza

People come to understand themselves as part of God, or Nature, both bodily and mentally. By this means, it is possible to achieve the greatest good, namely, the intellectual love of God.

Sidgwick

Practical philosophy ascertains that the intuitive method is the coherent method of common sense. Further, when properly understood, hedonistic utilitarianism is the message of the intuitive method. And finally, the moral advice of the dominant hedonistic utilitarians of the recent past is much sounder than their theory.

Butler

Self-love is the effective regulative principle that operates when individuals organize their desires to promote their own best interests.

Dewey

Social scientists should use experimental methods to study the conditions under which values arise, change, and become obsolete.

Marx

Surplus value refers to the percentage of society's work that exceeds what is necessary to keep the working class alive. The difference between what workers produce and what they are paid. A measure of the degree of working class exploitation.

Rawls

The "veil of ignorance" is as if each of us were to determine societal rules without knowing our place in society. In other words operating as free and rational persons with all factors of inequality eliminated in our thinking.

Augustine

The City of God is a "mystical and unanimous society of saints in heaven and believers on earth."

Dewey

The assumption that the pursuit of high ideals is unrelated to a concern for material welfare is a dangerous fallacy resulting in economic activity deprived of the guidance of moral values and moral values deprived of their indispensable foundation in material welfare.

Existentialism

The attempt to understand humanity by imposing rational categories is ill-fated.

Kant

The categorical imperative is the consistency at the core of the fundamental moral law--those actions are right that conform to the principles one can consistently will to be principles for everyone.

Sidgwick

The desirable consciousness principle declares that "Desirable Consciousness [Universal Happiness]...must be regarded as the ultimate Good."

Rawls

The difference principle is that inequality is permissible to the extent that it serves everyone's advantage and arises under conditions of equal opportunity.

Ross

The difficulty of "ideal utilitarianism" is that it seems to simplify our relations to our fellows, saying, in effect, that the only morally significant relation in which my neighbors stand to me is that of being possible beneficiaries by my action. There are no privileged relationships, ignoring the highly personal nature of duty.

Stevenson

The distinguishing feature of ethical disagreement is the underlying disagreement in attitude.

Rawls

The equality principle is that each person in a society has an equal right to the maximum liberty compatible with the same amount of liberty for everyone else.

Nietzsche

The essence of an individual is not reason, but will--the will to power.

Stevenson

The ethical theorist carries his/her analysis beyond ethical statements to include ethical situations, and, in particular, ethical disagreements.

Ayer

The ethical theorist has a legitimate function--the logical analysis of ethical (normative) terms, such as good and evil, right and wrong, as they are actually used in ethical discourse.

Mackie

The function of morality is to enlarge the limited sympathies and concern that people have for each other.

Mill

The greatest happiness principle is not essential as a motive for conduct, but it is essential as the rule by which conduct is judged and sanctioned.

A Baier

The historic absence of women in the formulation of the classical ethical theories has worked against their sufficiency.

Sidgwick

The justice principle declares that "whatever action any of us judges to be right for himself, he implicitly judges to be right for all similar persons in similar circumstances."

Moore

The meaning of terms such as right, ought, and duty are linked to maximizing intrinsic goodness.

Dewey

The methods of science must be applied to the problems of morality. The discrepancy between our knowledge of physical nature and our knowledge of human nature defines the problem of contemporary ethics.

K Baier

The moral point of view is determined by "looking at the world from the point of view of anyone" and for the good of everyone.

Williams

The motivation to live according to ethical standards cannot be created by means of a philosophical argument.

Bentham

The object of morality is the promotion of the greatest happiness of the maximum number of members of society--individually a favorable balance of pleasures over pain.

Moore

The objective reality of goodness consists in its being intrinsic--unchanging and absolute in the sense that "when anything possesses it...it would necessarily or must always, under all circumstances, possess it in exactly the same degree."

Sidgwick

The prudence principle declares that "a smaller present good is not to be preferred to a greater future good."

Sidgwick

The rational benevolence principle declares that "each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own."

Sidgwick

The reasoned procedures of philosophy are not those of discovery but rather those of analyzing and unifying materials otherwise provided.

Sidgwick

The role of technical philosophy is to bring our knowledge of the natural world into a systematic and coherent whole using factual knowledge, and the role of practical philosophy is to bring our knowledge of the moral world into systematic coherence using common sense.

Mill

The social feelings of mankind, the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, is the firm foundation of the ethical standard of general happiness.

Judeo-Christian ethic

The substance of morality focuses on the ideals of righteousness before God and the love of God and neighbor. Duty and right are the primary ethical concepts.

Nietzsche

The superiority of the noble caste does not lie in their physical, but in their psychical power--more "complete" men.

Theism

The traditional view that God, though a transcendent Being, is immanent in the universe and concerned with human affairs.

Deism

The view that because God is a transcendent Being, he can have no concern with or influence on human affairs.

Ethical naturalism

Theories claiming that value judgments can be reduced to, assimilated by, or at least justified by statements of fact alone--certain factual statements provide good reasons for value judgments.

Kierkegaard

There are "three stages on life's way"--three kinds of existence, the aesthetic where life is not taken seriously, the ethical when we fully acknowledge the authority of virtue and duty, and the religious where we recognize that our salvation depends on adopting a conviction of faith in which our choices are under infinite God's control rather than our own.

Mill

There are two gaps between individual psychological hedonism and universal ethical hedonism. First, if each individual is motivated solely by the desire for his or her own happiness, there is no reason to assume that personal actions will at the same time always promote the interests of society. Second, the descriptive fact that people do desire their own happiness does not imply the normative principle that people ought to act in accordance with this desire.

Nietzsche

There is in evolution no progress toward a goal, but a ceaseless, blind Will to Power.

Marx

Those who govern, or control the means of production, determine which conceptions will prevail in a given society.

Logical positivists

To say that science can always settle arguments about value is to make the assumption that agreement in attitude will always be consequent upon complete agreement in belief.

Traditional goal of moral philosophers

To seek, with the aid of reason, a consistent and correct ideal of life.

Spinoza

True freedom is action in accordance with the laws of our reason. All else is bondage.

Marx

True freedom will be expressed when the masses take control of the instruments of production.

A Baier

Trust is accepted vulnerability to another's possible but not expected ill will (or lack of good will) toward one.

A Baier

Trust relationships permeate human life, and our awareness of them is a basic source of moral precepts.

A Baier

Trust relationships, in themselves, are morally neutral.

Mill

Universal ethical hedonism, where "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" ought to be the individual's goal and standard of conduct, is a normative theory in that it stipulates what ought to be done.

Dewey

Values, as such, emerge only after examination of the conditions under which liking and disliking occur, and of the results to which they lead. Bare facts are the point of departure for the forming of value judgments.

Ross

We can only bring our imperfect knowledge of a situation to bear in making our decisions, without any guarantee of an objectively correct answer. Judgments about right actions are more often tentative than certain.

A Baier

We have neglected ethical analysis of primal moral trusts that are, in whole or in part, asymmetrical in form.

Marx

When society no longer has a structure of classes, the antagonism and opposition that attend such relationships will disappear. And because moral principles originate in class conflicts, they will no longer be needed or have any authoritative role in society.

Ross

While prima facie duties are self-evidently true, the properties of a moral act are not necessarily or usually consistent. Moral acts are usually simultaneously prima facie right and prima facie wrong in that they often help one individual at the expense of another.

Existentialism

Who people are is a function of their choices, their choices are not a function of who they are.

Foot

Wisdom requires knowing both the means to certain good ends as well as how much particular ends are worth--the use of knowledge.

Casuists

draw on moral principles, law, religion, and related areas in attempts to determine concrete cases of morality.

Ethical theorists

seek out the theory that lies beneath actual practice, revealing the inconsistencies of ordinary moral thought and practice.

Moralists

tell us what they think we ought to do and exhort us to follow the right way.

Ethical theorists

undertake the systematic questioning and critical examination of the underlying principles of morality.

Social scientists

use definition, classification, and generalizations to describe how we actually behave.