Unit 2: Ethics, Reason and the Good Life
What you must understand
Unit 2 turns to practical philosophy. You need the major normative frameworks and their contrasts: consequentialism (including utilitarianism), deontology (duty and the categorical imperative), virtue ethics (character and flourishing), and at least one relational or care-based approach. You also need meta-ethical vocabulary - moral realism, relativism, subjectivism, and the is/ought distinction - plus the concepts of moral responsibility, free will, and justice.
Traps that appear in questions
- Conflating act and rule utilitarianism. Questions may describe a rule-based version and expect you to notice it is not act-based.
- Treating relativism as tolerance. Descriptive relativism (people disagree) does not entail normative relativism (we ought not judge).
- Ignoring the is/ought gap. A factual premise about what people do never by itself yields a conclusion about what they ought to do.
- Strawmanning a theory. Applying a framework means using its actual criterion, not a caricature of it.
Worked example
A scenario asks whether a doctor should lie to a patient to prevent distress. A utilitarian weighs total welfare across affected parties; a Kantian asks whether the maxim of lying could be universalised and whether the patient is treated as an end; a virtue ethicist asks what a compassionate and honest person would do. A strong answer applies one framework consistently, states the criterion explicitly, and then notes a limitation of that framework.
Rule of thumb
Name the theory's decision criterion in one sentence before applying it. If you cannot state the criterion, you are not yet applying the theory.