Types of Morality
Cultural Relativism is the view that moral or ethical systems, which vary from culture to culture, are all equally valid and no one system is really “better” than any other. This is based on the idea that there is no ultimate standard of good or evil, so every judgment about right and wrong is a product of society.
Ethical Egoism reminds us that self-interest is a virtue, but most philosophers believe ethical egoists are mistaken in arguing that it is the only virtue. To flourish, we should seek self-interest, but not just self-interest.
Divine command theory (also known as theological voluntarism) is a meta-ethical theory which proposes that an action's status as morally good is equivalent to whether it is commanded by God. The theory asserts that what is moral is determined by what God commands, and that for a person to be moral is to follow his commands.
Virtue ethics focuses on the development of sound moral character rather than moral rules. In this theory, it is believed that having a virtuous character leads to virtuous decisions. What is Virtue Ethics? Both teleological and deontological ethical theories are called deontic or action-based theories of morality.
What Is Feminist Ethics? Hilde Lindemann Hilde Lindemann offers us a brief overview of feminist ethics in this ... Fundamental Readings in Ethics and Moral Problems.
Utilitarianism is a theory in normative ethics, or the ethics that define the morality of actions, as proposed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. It is defined by utility, the existence of pleasure and the absence of pain.
Like Kantian ethics, discourse ethics is a cognitive ethical theory, in that it supposes that truth and falsity can be attributed to ethical propositions. It also formulates a rule by which ethical actions can be determined and proposes that ethical actions should be universalisable, in a similar way to Kant's ethics.
Rights-based ethics is centered around the idea that people possess certain rights merely by virtue of being born human. Examples of rights-based ethics at work include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions and the United States' Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and Constitution.