All societies have a set of moral standards by which they require or urge their members to abide. Although those standards might be more or less exacting in the obligations they impose and more or less observed in actual compliance, they do constitute an important dimension of social life. However, descriptive efforts to map the morality of any particular society are of limited value because they will reveal little about the important question of whether such morality is worthy of approval or adoption. Accordingly, it is necessary to develop a framework within which to evaluate conduct that is claimed to be morally defensible and also to confirm or deny its acceptability. This is the focus of ethical study. At its broadest, ethics involves a meditation on what is wrong and right and, most important, on how such standards are arrived at and validated. Traditionally, the task was to elaborate and justify a set of ethical norms that provided an authoritative code that people could consult and follow in resolving difficult dilemmas. However, faith in the possibility of sketching such a body of enduring and universally valid rules has been waning. There is now the less absolutist and more skeptical acceptance that ethics is a situational practice that cannot claim objective or neutral justification in any genuinely strong or enduring way. As such, what is to count as a good moral reason is a matter of justification and persuasion, not proof and authority.

THE ETHICAL PROJECT

At bottom, ethics is about putting limits on the unhindered pursuit of self-interest. While there will be some overlap in particular instances between ethical justification and the advancement of self-interest, this is as much by coincidence as by design. The recognition and promotion of self-interest are not entirely inappropriate; people are not expected to be selfless or saintly in achieving ethical approval for all their actions. So, while people are entitled to weigh self-interest in the balance in reaching an ethically defensible line of conduct, they are not permitted to prioritize it without more. As such, an ethical schema that reduces only to the facilitation of individuals’ self-interest is really no ethics at all.