Ethics is an interest in, and interrogation of, matters of existential weal and woe in social life, how we deal with, respond to, and affect each other’s betterment and suffering. Ethical matters include (1) welfare (human development and flourishing), (2) help and harm, (3) justice (fairness and reciprocity), (4) freedom, (5) responsibility, and (6) virtue (dispositions and capacities that shape a person’s character, social bearing, and course of life). As a social enterprise, ethics has a dialogical character, as a process of engaging each other’s interests, needs, prospects, and actions. As a normative enterprise, ethics involves preferences and estimations of better and worse ways of living, along with the shaping of an “ought” as a measure or guidance for such evaluations. As a practical enterprise, ethics pertains to actions and modes of living; and in the face of multiple estimations and the openness of future possibilities, ethics calls for deliberation and decision.
In such a setting, ethical interrogation unfolds as (1) action-guiding (What should I do?), (2) action-judging (Did I act well?), (3) value-disclosing (What is good or worth desiring?), and (4) life-shaping (What kind of life should I/we lead?). In these matters, moral philosophy should not be bound by the modern fixation on “theory,” on the project of rational justification and the privileging of abstract principles over concrete situations. Ethics should be understood as the contingent, heuristic, interactive engagement of basic practical questions: How should human beings live? How should we live together? How should we treat each other? What do we owe each other? What are better and worse ways of conducting our lives?