Top Highlights

• Ethics are important because they give direction to people and societies who have some sense that they cannot flourish without being moral.
• Morality is primarily concerned with questions of right and wrong, the ability to distinguish between the two, and the justification of the distinction.
• Among other things, the naturalist holds that all reality is reducible to that which can be perceived with one’s senses—that is, there is nothing that is real or that counts for knowledge that is not verifiable by the senses. As a result, moral knowledge has been reduced to the realm of belief and is considered parallel to religious beliefs, which ...
• Technically, morality refers to the actual content of right and wrong, and ethics refers to the process of determining right and wrong. In other words, morality deals with moral knowledge and ethics with moral reasoning.
• Four broad categories have traditionally fallen under the heading of ethics. They include (1) descriptive ethics, (2) normative ethics, (3) metaethics, and (4) aretaic ethics.