Normative ethics asks what we ought to do. Metaethics asks what moral claims are. Applied ethics asks how to handle specific domains such as medicine, war, or business. Normative ethics sits in the middle: it tries to articulate principles and virtues that can guide action across many contexts. A guided tour of normative ethics needs […]

Normative ethics asks what we ought to do and why. It often looks like a set of competing theories: virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and more. That picture is not wrong, but it can miss how the field has changed over time. Normative ethics has not simply accumulated theories. It has repeatedly shifted the center of […]

Evidence is often treated as a scientific concept: measurement, experiment, and statistical confirmation. Normative ethics uses evidence too, but it uses it differently because its subject is not merely what happens. Its subject is what ought to happen: what is permissible, required, forbidden, and admirable. This can make ethics seem “unscientific” \to some critics and […]