DIMENSIONS OF ETHICS

Could relate to three aspects

1) Schools of ethics: utilitarianism, teleology, deontology, rights
based
2) Various fields of ethics like bioethics, business ethics, ethics of
doctors
3) Ethical decisions can be made at a variety of levels, ranging
from the individual to the societal and even the transnational
Other applied dimensions
1. Abortions
Kants questions
1) How if every on acted in the same way in the society
Normative ethics refers to the sudy of moral standards based
onwhich various issues are decided
Traditions in normative ethics
1. Relativism (normative)
2. Egoism : virtue ethics
3. Teleology
4. deontology

Introduction

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Contractarianism refers to both the theory in Political Philosophy on

the legitimacy of political authority, and the ethicaltheory
concerning the origin, or legitimate content, of moral norms.
Both were developed from the concept of a social contract, the idea
that the people give up some rights to a government and/or other
authority in order to receive, or jointly preserve, social order. Social
contract theory provides the rationale behind the historically
important notion that legitimate state authority must be derived

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from the consent of the governed, where the formand content of

this consent derives from the idea of contract or mutual agreement.
Contractarianism suggests that people are primarily self-interested,
and that a rational assessment of the best strategy for attaining
the maximization of their self-interest will lead them to
act morally and to consent to governmental authority.
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Contractarian Ethics
Contractarian Ethics (or the Moral Theory of Contractarianism)
claims that moral norms derive their normative force from the idea
of contract or mutual agreement. It is the deontological theory that
moral acts are those that we would all agree to if we were unbiased,
and that moral rules themselves are a sort of a contract, and
therefore only people who understand and agree to the terms of the
contract are bound by it.
The theory stems initially from the principle of social
contract of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke,
which (as described above) essentially holds that people give up some
rights to a government and/or other authority in order to receive, or
jointly preserve, social order.
Contractualismis a variation on Contractarianism, largely developed
by T. M. Scanlon (1940 - ) in his book "What We Owe to Each
Other". It claims to be a moral theory grounded in reality, and is
based on the Kantian ideas that ethics is an essentially interpersonal
matter, and that right and wrong are a matter of whether we
can justify the action to other people.

Ethics of care
The ethics of care is a normative ethical theory; that is, a theory
about what makes actions right or wrong. It is one of a cluster of
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normative ethical theories that were developed by feminists in the

second half of the twentieth century.
While consequentialist and deontological ethical theories emphasize
universal standards and impartiality, ethics of care emphasize the
importance of response. "The shift in moral perspective is manifest by
a change in the moral question from "what is just?" to "how to
respond?"[1] Ethics of care criticizes the applications of universal
standards as "morally problematic, since it breeds moral blindness or
indifference."[2]

The basic beliefs of the theory are:

1. All individuals are interdependent for achieving their interests
2. Those particularly vulnerable to our choices and their
outcomes deserve extra consideration to be measured
according to
1. the level of their vulnerability to one's choices
2. the level of their affectedness by one's choices and no one
else's
3. It is necessary to attend to the contextual details of the
situation in order to safeguard and promote the actual specific
interests of those involved

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