Normative Ethics
Normative ethics is a key branch of ethics focused on determining what constitutes right and wrong actions. It aims to establish general principles that can guide individuals toward ethical living, by examining the motivations behind actions and the consequences of those actions. Normative ethics serves as a foundation for developing ethical codes of conduct and often contrasts with applied ethics, which assesses specific actions, and metaethics, which explores the nature of ethics itself.
Within normative ethics, several theories provide different approaches to understanding morality. Virtue ethics emphasizes the importance of developing good character traits or virtues, suggesting that individuals should cultivate habits that naturally lead them to make ethical choices. Deontological ethics, on the other hand, concentrates on adherence to rules and duties, positing that certain actions are inherently right or wrong regardless of their outcomes. Lastly, consequential ethics evaluates the morality of actions based on their outcomes, advocating for choices that lead to the most favorable results for the greatest number of people. Together, these theories offer various lenses through which to explore ethical decision-making, reflecting diverse philosophical traditions and perspectives.
Normative Ethics
Normative ethics is the branch of ethics that studies what makes actions right and wrong. The basic use of normative ethics is to help philosophers and others develop ethical codes of conduct. Normative ethics teaches that by contemplating what makes an action right and what makes an action wrong, a person can develop a blueprint for living an ethical life. Normative ethics are the type of ethics that most help people determine how they should live their lives.
Philosophical Ethics and Normative Ethics
Often, the study of ethics is broken into philosophical inquiry and non-philosophical inquiry. Philosophical inquiry, or philosophical ethics, is broken down into three parts: applied ethics, metaethics, and normative ethics. Applied ethics is the branch of ethics that examines the actions that humans take and whether those actions are right or wrong. Metaethics is the study of the nature of ethics, and it examines ideas about ethics and moral reasoning. Normative ethicstries to determine the best way for people to live.
Normative ethics is concerned with the general principals of right and wrong and is not as concerned about individual actions as the field of applied ethics is. People who study normative ethics are concerned with finding the most general moral principles—not the most specific. People considering normative ethics want to find out if one overarching moral principal can relate to all matters of life.
Some normative ethics theories focus on having one criterion on which people can base their moral judgments. A person might use the Golden Rule to make moral judgments. The Golden Rule states, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A person using this rule can judge all his or her moral decisions by the one rule. As an example, a person considers stealing another's money. The person would not like to be robbed of money, so the individual judges that stealing is wrong. Other normative theories focus on having a set of criteria that people use to base their judgments. Either way, normative ethics searches for the universal moral code that can be applied to all people and all situations.
Normative Ethics Theories
A number of different normative ethics theories exist. Normative ethics theories are generally broken into three types of theories: virtue ethics (agent-centered), deontological ethics (act centered), and consequential ethics (act centered). An agent-centered theory examines the motivations of the people doing the acts, and an act-centered theory explores the morality of the acts themselves.
Virtue Ethics
Many ethical theories are act centered, which means they focus on the acts that people should or should not do (e.g., one should not kill innocent people, one should not lie). However, virtue ethics focuses on the person, or agent, taking the action. People who subscribe to virtue ethics believe that agents should develop good habits of character. With these good habits, a person will naturally choose the most ethical behavior in any particular situation.
The idea of virtue ethics has been around for thousands of years, and many ancient philosophers believed in virtue ethics. For example, Plato (circa 428 – 348 B.C.E.) believed that people should develop the virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice so they could lead moral lives. Some theologians believe that people should also have three other virtues: faith, hope, and charity. Virtue ethics discover whether a virtuous person would take a particular action.
Deontological Ethics (or Duty Ethics)
Deontological ethics, or duty ethics, is a field of ethics that focuses on the acts that people do. This type of ethics is based on rules about people’s behavior. Deontologists (or those who subscribe to deontological ethics) believe people must follow certain rules to be ethical. The rules that set the ethical standard in deontological ethics may be religious rules, or they may be derived from logical reasoning.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) is one of the most famous figures in duty-based ethics, and in normative ethics in general. Kantian ethics has become one of the most famous duty ethics theories, but it is not the only one. Kant believed that people have duties toward each other that they must fulfill, and some duty ethics theories are based on this idea.
Three other main different duty ethics theories exist. The first was created by German philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf (1632 – 1694), who believed that people have duties to God, duties to themselves, and duties to others. The second is right theory, which suggests that people deserve certain rights so other people have the duty to preserve those rights (e.g., a person has a right to life, so others cannot kill that person). Another duty ethics theory was developed by British philosopher W.D. Ross (1877 – 1971), who believed that people’s duties include fidelity, reparation, gratitude, justice, beneficence, self-improvement, and nonmaleficence.
Consequential Ethics
Another type of act-centered ethics is consequential ethics. Unlike deontological ethics, consequential ethics is focused on the outcome of the action rather than the intent of the action. Consequentialists believe that the outcome of an action is the only thing that matters when making ethical decisions. When making a decision, a consequentialist would weigh the good and bad outcomes that come about because of an action. Philosophers developed consequential ethics because they wanted to use ethical theories that could be informed by experience rather than by convention and moral norms, as deontological ethics is.
Consequential ethics includes a number of theories. The first is ethical egoism, which states that people should take actions that will have good outcomes for the individual doing the act. The second is ethical altruism, which states that people should take actions that will have good outcomes for everyone except the person doing the action. Utilitarianism is another theory, which states that a person should take an action that has the most favorable outcome for everyone, including the person doing the action.
Bibliography
Fieser, James. "Ethics." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, www.iep.utm.edu/ethics. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.
Kagan, Shelly. Normative Ethics. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998. Print.
Roussos, Joe. "Modelling in Normative Ethics." Ethical Theory and Moral Ethics, 3 Oct. 2022, link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10677-022-10326-4. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.