As Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca Walkowitz write: ‘From Aristotle and Kant to Nietzsche and Hegel to Habermas and Foucault to Derrida and Lacan and Levinas … the concept of ethics and the ethical has been reconceptualized, reformulated, and repositioned’ (2000: viii). Originating from the ancient Greek word ethos, used to denote the customs or character of the polis and its citizens, ethics, it has been suggested, consists in the study of ‘what is morally good and bad, right and wrong’ (Singer 2014); and the ‘systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior’ (Fieser 2012). Jacques Rancière offers a different formulation, however, classifying ethics as a mode of thinking in which ‘an identity is established between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action’ ([2006] 2010: 184). Conventionally, ethics, often distinguished as ‘normative ethics’, has been sub-divided into three fields: deontology, which takes duties that are obligatory, irrespective of their consequences, as the focus of ethics; consequentialism, of which utilitarianism is the most influential form, and which stresses the results of actions, as in the maximisation of happiness; and virtue ethics, which focuses on moral character or ‘the virtues’, such as generosity or compassion.

Not all recent accounts of ‘ethics’, however, conform easily or neatly to the three approaches listed. Levinas, for example, defines ethics as ‘first philosophy’ (1984), and understands it in terms of a relation to - and an impingement by - the other that precedes the formation of the self. Within poststructuralism broadly conceived, ethics has been theorised variously as a mode of self-fashioning or ‘care of the self’ (Foucault 1985, 1991, 2000), and as an ‘ethos of critical responsiveness’ (Connolly 1995: xvi) or of ‘generosity’ (for example, Connolly 2002a, 2002b). Just as ethics was once seen as the province of ‘an ideal, autonomous and sovereign subject’ and a universal humanism (Garber et al. 2000: viii), so too of late the subject has come to be regarded as the ‘problem’ of ethics, not its ground (Loizidou 2007: 46).

Troubling definitional matters do not end there. Paradoxically, ethics has been seen simultaneously as ‘the philosophical study of morality’ (Deigh 1999: 284); as a synonym for both morality (Deigh 1999) and for ‘moral philosophy’ (Singer 2014); and as conceptually distinct from morality.