DSST Ethics in America cheat sheet

Ethics in America: Core Frameworks and Exam Map

• Consequentialism judges acts solely by outcomes; utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill) specifies the good as aggregate welfare, with Mill's harm principle limiting coercion to prevention of harm to others.

• Kant's categorical imperative has two key formulations: universalizability (act only on maxims you could will as universal law) and the humanity formula (treat persons as ends, never merely as means).

• Aristotelian virtue ethics locates morality in stable character traits (virtues) cultivated by habit and guided by phronesis (practical wisdom), with virtue as a mean between excess and deficiency.

• Rawls's justice as fairness uses the original position and veil of ignorance to derive two principles: equal basic liberties, and inequalities permitted only if they benefit the least advantaged (difference principle).

• Ethical egoism holds that each person ought to pursue self-interest; psychological egoism is a descriptive claim that people always do act self-interestedly - the two claims are logically independent.

• Natural law theory (Aquinas) holds that moral norms are grounded in human nature and discoverable by reason; divine command theory instead grounds obligation in God's will.

• Cultural relativism describes morality as relative to a group's norms; the descriptive claim (groups differ) does not entail the metaethical claim (no universal standard).

• Moral objectivism holds some moral truths are mind-independent; moral subjectivism grounds them in individual attitudes; emotivism (Ayer, Stevenson) treats moral utterances as expressions of feeling.