What is Ethics?

Have you ever had to make a difficult moral choice? Maybe you’ve wrestled with a tough hypothetical question or even considered whether your values align with how you live. Whenever we call upon our morals and values to decide on the best possible outcome, we engage with ethics. Ethics invites us to ask questions like:

What is the difference between right and wrong?

Should we organize society differently than we do now?

Is what I’m doing making the world a better place?

How do I know if I’m living my life well? 

It’s not always easy or intuitive to make the right choice, and not everyone's ethical standard align, which is why studying ethics in college can help you gain problem-solving, critical thinking, and analytical skills that will bring a valuable perspective to your future career--and to your life in general! So, what can you learn from studying ethics? Keep reading to see if an ethics major is the right thing for you!

What is ethics, and why is it important to study it?

Merriam Webster defines ethics (sometimes called moral philosophy) as “a theory or system of moral values.” The term ethics also refers to “the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.” Ethics can refer to a system of values held by an individual, a group, or an organization or institution.

Living in a society means that there are all sorts of structures in place that are based on ethical codes and moral values. Ethics are at the root of our justice system, which involves the laws and policies that govern behavior in society. Ethics are also the driving force behind activism and social justice, which aim to make society better by examining how these systems affect people’s lives.

Ethics are important to your personal life, too! According to a study by Dr. Harvey S. James, published in the social sciences journal Kyklos, people who live lives according to their own personal ethics are, on average, much happier and more satisfied with life than people who do not. James says, “A consideration of the ethical norms of societies can improve our understanding of what contributes to the subjective well-being of people. While income, personal characteristics, and social values play a role in affecting happiness, so does the personal ethics of people.”

From Aristotle in 300 BC to Immanuel Kant in the 18th century to Angela Davis, through her modern activism fighting for civil rights, philosophers and scholars have always tried to understand the complex ways that our moral principle develops our character and manifests within society. As the world gets more and more complicated, so do the problems people face. At some point, each person would face their own ethical dilemma. Students who have a broad knowledge of ethics and who understand how their own moral value comes into play will be prepared to take on the same questions that these philosophers have considered for millennia.

What are the different kinds of ethics?

There are many different approaches to ethical decision making, all of which have different methods of argument and serve different purposes. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s guide to the types of ethics, these are some of the most commonly referenced types: 

• Normative ethics seeks to establish norms or standards of conduct; a crucial question in this field is whether actions are to be judged right or wrong based on their consequences or based on their conformity to some moral judgment, such as “Do not tell a lie.”
• Metaethics is concerned with the nature of ethical judgment and theories. Since the beginning of the 20th century, much work in metaethics has focused on the logical and semantic aspects of moral language.
• Applied ethics looks at how to apply what we know about business ethics and other types of ethics to practical moral problems.