The Fundamentals of Ethics

The Introduction provides an overview of ethics as the area of philosophy concerned with how humans ought to behave. Shafer-Landau cautions that the field of ethics—also called moral philosophy—is vast and a single volume cannot cover all relevant topics. The Fundamental of Ethics is therefore mainly an exploration and analysis of prominent ethical theories, separated into three core areas: value theory, normative ethics, and metaethics. The first area, value ethics, attempts to pinpoint the nature and provenance of human well-being. The second, normative ethics, addresses moral relations between individuals and their responsibilities. Finally, metaethics observes and comments on the field of ethics as a whole.

Due to the general lack of consensus on all matters concerning ethics, people are often tempted to fall into ethical skepticism. This is the belief that there is no morality, or that all morality is entirely subjective to the beholder. Shafer-Landau agrees that moral philosophy is a difficult subject to grasp. However, arguing that morality is make-believe or entirely dependent on the individual or society is also extremely controversial, even among the most acclaimed moral philosophers. Moral skepticism and all its theories have their fair share of flaws and should only be used “as a last resort” (5).