What Is Ethics? Metaethics, Normative Ethics, and Applied Ethics

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies how we ought to live, what makes actions right or wrong, and what kinds of people we ought to become. Because the subject is so broad, philosophers usually divide it into three levels of inquiry, each asking a different sort of question.

Three levels of ethical inquiry

Normative ethics asks the first-order question: what should we actually do? It tries to formulate and defend general standards of right conduct. When a theory tells us to maximize happiness, or to act only on rules we could will for everyone, or to cultivate virtuous character, it is doing normative ethics. The three great families of normative theory that dominate this unit are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics.

Applied ethics takes those standards and brings the