The Structure of Normative Ethics

If you open a typical textbook on normative ethics, it will have a discussion of what it thinks of as rival theories: there might be a chapter each on, say, utilitarianism, contractarianism, and virtue theory. The assumption seems to be that these three are alternative attempts to answer the same basic questions. This seems to me exactly incorrect At least as they are ordinarily understood, these three are addressing three different concerns in normative ethics, and in principle-although almost never in practice-they are completely compatible. Failure to see this, I believe, is due to our failure to have an adequate "map" of the structure of normative ethics. We lack an adequate account of what the various theories in normative ethics are trying to accomplish. It is not that there is nothing at all like a received view concerning the nature of normative ethics: roughly, normative ethics involves the attempt to state and defend the basic principles of morality. It is concerned with determining which actions are right, which wrong, what is permitted and what forbidden. Similarly, it might be said to treat the basic moral rights, duties, virtues, and so on. So far as it goes, there is nothing wrong with this account. But it does not go very far. It is like a map of a country which only displays its border. Such a map can serve to distinguish one country from another-as our account can help to set off normative ethics from metaethics-but it gives no significant detail about the internal features of the country. What we lack-what the received view does not give us-is a sense of the major regions of normative ethics and how they are related to one another. Lacking an adequate guide to the structure of normative ethics we can fail to recognize what we are doing when we compare and evaluate the specific normative theories that have been offered. In this essay, then, I want to try to lay out the basic outlines of a more