Ethical theories and their application

Abstract

Your life consists of a series of actions. You do mundane things. You brush your teeth and buy cups of coffee. You do momentous things. You fall in love and have a child. Mundane or momentous, you have no doubt thought about whether what you did is, in point of fact, what you ought to have done. Think, for example, about something you did that you deeply regret. (Take a moment to actually do this.) When thinking about this regrettable action, you are, inevitably, having two very different kinds of thoughts. You are thinking about what happened. You are having descriptive thoughts about what was the case. But, insofar as what you did was regrettable, you are also thinking about what should have happened. You are thus also having normative thoughts about what ought to have been the case (but wasn’t) or what you were required to do (but didn’t). Here—in the normative domain—is where ethics resides.