Comparative Ethics and Value Systems: Levels, Frameworks, and Diagnosis
This domain tests whether you can place a moral claim at the right level of analysis and compare traditions on the same case.
Three levels
Metaethics asks whether moral claims are truth-apt (cognitivism) and whether any are true (realism). Anti-realist options include emotivism (Ayer, Stevenson), prescriptivism (Hare), and error theory (Mackie). Normative ethics asks what makes acts right. Applied ethics applies a theory to a case. Many answers fail because they respond to a metaethical question with a normative theory.
The main frameworks
- Deontology: Kant's universalizability and humanity-as-end formulas; duties constrain consequences.
- Consequentialism: rightness depends on outcomes; utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill) is the classic form, with act and rule variants.
- Virtue ethics: Aristotle's eudaimonia, phronesis, and the mean between vices; MacIntyre's recovery of practices and traditions.
- Divine command theory: obligation depends on God's commands. The Euthyphro dilemma (Plato, Euthyphro 10a) asks whether the pious is loved because it is pious or pious because loved. A standard reply locates goodness in God's nature rather than arbitrary will (Adams' modified version).
- Natural law: Aquinas' four laws; human flourishing discerned by reason.
- Karma/dharma ethics: intention and consequence across lives; Confucian relational ethics (ren, li, xiao); Ubuntu: personhood constituted through community.
Worked example
A murderer asks where your friend is hiding. Kant forbids lying even here. A utilitarian lies. A virtue ethicist asks what truthfulness and prudence require in this situation. Natural law treats lying as intrinsically disordered. Divine command asks what God commands. The disagreement is diagnostic: each theory locates the morally basic feature elsewhere - intention, outcome, character, nature, or divine will.
Traps that cost marks
- Confusing metaethics with normative ethics.
- Treating the Euthyphro dilemma as a refutation rather than a dilemma with replies.
- Equating utilitarianism with consequentialism generally.
- Confusing descriptive relativism (people differ) with normative relativism (we ought to defer).
- Caricaturing divine command theory as arbitrary fiat.