Critical Thinking Report: Moral Claims and Theories

9.1 Ethical Claims

Both ethics and morals involve considerations about what’s right and wrong. The term “ethics” derives from the Greek word ethos, meaning character, while “moral” comes from the Latin word moralis, meaning ethical. So the words “ethics” and “morals” are often used interchangeably.

For most of this text, we’ve been exploring the ways that people provide support that a claim is true. But now we’re exploring something quite different: how people provide support that a claim is right—not “right” in the sense of being accurate but “right” in the sense of being the morally correct thing to do.

Not everything has a moral dimension. Some things, like arithmetic, are amoral. The equation 2 + 2 = 4 is neither good nor bad, it’s just true. In contrast, consider the following claim:

It is wrong to eat meat.

This is still a conclusion, and to persuade others to believe it we will need to construct an argument (i.e., provide sound reasoning to support this conclusion). So we’re still dealing with claims and arguments, fallacies and sources, and so on, but we’ve completely left the realm of science, with its observable phenomena and replicable experiments. We’re in the land of ethics now.

We learn ethics like we learn everything else: through a mixture of personal experience and shared knowledge. Every society possesses a sense that some things are right and others are wrong. Generally speaking, we believe that it is good to help other people and bad to hurt them. We learn this from our own reactions to things as we grow up and develop our sense of self. And these lessons are reinforced by parents, teachers, friends, and strangers, as well as in the stories of our culture.

A Few Helpful Terms for Discussing Ethics

Ethics: thinking and reasoning about right and wrong.

Moral principles: rules of conduct that guide an individual’s actions to take into account the interests of other people.

Excuse: a reason offered for breaking a moral principle in a given situation.

Justification: an argument claiming that violating some moral principle is actually the right course of action in a given situation.

Killing is wrong… (moral principle)

… unless you are killing someone as punishment for killing someone else.(justification)

Moral dilemma: a situation in which there is not an obvious ethically right or wrong answer, often because there are two moral principles in conflict with each other.

An armed man has entered a school and is killing children.

It’s wrong to kill.

Should I kill him to keep him from killing others?