⚖️ Ethics

What you’ll learn

1. The Question Behind the QuestionDefine what ethics as a discipline actually asks, and separate normative ethics from description, law, and taste.Ethics asks what we ought to do and why, which is a different question from what people in fact do (description), what the law permits, or what feels right. Hume's observation that an 'ought' never follows from an 'is' alone marks off the territory: facts constrain moral conclusions but never produce them by themselves. The discipline is the attempt to give reasons for oughts — reasons that can be examined by someone who disagrees.
2. Consequentialism at Its BestUnderstand consequentialism as its best advocates state it — the view that outcomes are what ultimately matter — and the strongest objections to it.Consequentialism holds that the rightness of an act depends on its results, with classical utilitarianism measuring those results in well-being counted impartially. Its power is real: it takes suffering seriously wherever it occurs, it refuses to let tradition or status exempt anyone, and it underwrites most modern policy analysis. Its costs are equally real: demandingness, the aggregation problem, and the objection that it does not respect the separateness of persons.
3. Deontology at Its BestUnderstand duty-based ethics as Kant's defenders state it — some acts are wrong regardless of outcome — and the strongest objections.Deontology holds that some acts are right or wrong in themselves, independent of consequences, because morality is a matter of what we owe one another as rational agents. Kant's categorical imperative tests whether the principle behind your act could be willed universally, and his humanity formula forbids treating a person merely as a means. Its power is that it explains rights and the wrongness of using people; its cost is rigidity, and its difficulty with conflicting duties.
4. Virtue Ethics at Its BestUnderstand the virtue tradition as its defenders state it — the question is what kind of person to be — and the strongest objections.Virtue ethics asks not 'what should I do?' but 'what would a person of good character do, and who am I becoming?' Aristotle's account centres on eudaimonia, virtues as stable dispositions lying between excess and deficiency, and phronesis — practical wisdom — as the judgement that cannot be reduced to rules. Its power is realism about how moral life is actually lived; its cost is a thin account of what to do in a hard case right now.
5. Contractualism at Its BestUnderstand ethics as what we could justify to each other, from Hobbes through Rawls to Scanlon — and its limits.Contractualism grounds morality in agreement: principles are right if they could be justified to everyone bound by them. Rawls's veil of ignorance turns this into a procedure for testing fairness by removing knowledge of your own position, and Scanlon reframes wrongness as what no one could reasonably reject. Its power is that it takes each person's standpoint seriously one by one; its central difficulty is who counts as a party to the contract.
6. Thought Experiments Are Probes, Not ProofsUse thought experiments correctly — as instruments that isolate intuitions — and understand why the trolley problem settles nothing.The trolley problem was designed by Philippa Foot to isolate a puzzle about the distinction between doing and allowing, not to establish which framework is correct. Its value lies in the gap between the switch case and the footbridge case: nearly everyone's intuitions diverge, and no framework explains that divergence comfortably. Treating such cases as arguments confuses a diagnostic instrument with a proof.
7. Where the Lenses Disagree — and Why That’s the PointSee the frameworks converge on most cases and diverge on structured ones — and understand what that divergence indicates.The frameworks agree far more than introductory teaching suggests: on the overwhelming majority of real decisions they deliver the same verdict by different routes. They diverge in a patterned way, typically where an individual's claim collides with an aggregate benefit. That the disagreement is patterned rather than random suggests the theories are tracking genuinely different moral considerations, all of which are real — which is why the discipline has not resolved and arguably should not.
8. Real Dilemmas: Work and TechnologyApply all four lenses to live dilemmas in employment and technology without collapsing them into one verdict.Real dilemmas differ from thought experiments in that the facts are uncertain, the actors are institutions, and the harms are distributed and delayed. Running all four lenses over a case like whistleblowing or algorithmic decision-making does not produce a verdict, but it does produce a map — showing which considerations each framework surfaces, and which the others would have let you miss.
9. Disagreement, Relativism, and Living With the QuestionDistinguish moral disagreement from relativism, understand what moral progress implies, and close the course's argument.Widespread moral disagreement does not establish relativism: people disagree about facts too, and much apparent moral disagreement turns out to be disagreement about non-moral facts. The reality of moral progress is the hardest problem for relativism, since calling abolition an improvement requires a standard outside the culture that changed. The course closes where it began: frameworks are lenses, not referees, and the work is learning what each shows and what it hides.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
• John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863)
• Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), trans. T. K. Abbott
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
• G. E. M. Anscombe, 'Modern Moral Philosophy', Philosophy 33 (1958)
• Philippa Foot, 'The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect' (1967)
• Judith Jarvis Thomson, 'The Trolley Problem', Yale Law Journal 94 (1985)
• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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