What makes something right? Philosophers give 6 main answers: duty, consequences, virtue, nature or conscience, god's will and morality questioned. AskPhilosophy presents 50 arguments, from Confucius to Jürgen Habermas, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts.
The 6 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
An action is right if it follows a rule valid for everyone, whatever the consequences.
Kant, Thomas d'Aquin, Jürgen Habermas, W. D. Ross
An action is right if it produces the most good, or the least harm, for all.
Machiavel, Bacon, Gramsci, Jeremy Bentham…
What matters is character: acting as a just and kind person would.
Confucius, Aristote, Socrate, Cicéron…
The good is written in human nature or reason, not in an external command.
Platon, Thomas d'Aquin, Rousseau, Camus…
The good comes from God: his commands, or faith, come first.
Kierkegaard, Guillaume d'Ockham, Fiodor Dostoïevski, Robert Merrihew Adams…
Our values have a history, or cannot be stated: they must be questioned.
Platon, Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir…
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
Duty
An action is right if it follows a rule valid for everyone, whatever the consequences.
6 argumentsThe categorical imperative: the false promise
If everyone made false promises, nobody would believe any promise: the rule would defeat itself.
Treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means
Each of us sees ourselves as an end in itself, and every rational being does so for the same reason: all have absolute worth.
No right to lie, not even to the murderer
Telling the truth is a duty without exception, and lying, even to a murderer, wrongs humanity as a whole.
One act, two effects: willing the good, accepting the foreseen harm
An act is judged by what is intended, not by what is foreseen but not aimed at: an unintended bad effect can be allowed.
A rule is valid if everyone it affects could accept it in a free discussion
A rule is valid only if everyone it affects can accept it, and only a discussion with them can show whether they do.
Several prima facie duties, and judgement to decide
We have several distinct duties, none absolute or reducible to one principle: when they clash, we must judge the situation.
Consequences
An action is right if it produces the most good, or the least harm, for all.
9 argumentsBetter to be feared than loved
Love rests on obligation and breaks when interest demands it, while fear of punishment never lets go.
Learning how not to be good
Whoever tries to be good in everything among men who are not will be ruined, and the state with him.
Commanding nature by obeying her
Where the cause is unknown the effect cannot be produced: knowledge and power meet, and nature is commanded only by obeying her.
I hate the indifferent
Indifference is not neutral: evil comes less from the few who act than from the abstention of the many, who could have acted.
The principle of utility: calculating pleasures and pains
Only pleasure and pain have value, and they can be measured and added up: the right act produces the greatest total happiness.
Love all human beings without distinction, because it benefits the world most
Wars and thefts come from each person loving only his own; if everyone loved others as himself, these evils would vanish.
Better to be Socrates dissatisfied: Mill's utilitarianism
Of two pleasures, the better is the one nearly everyone who has known both prefers.
Turning the trolley: one death rather than five
When every option causes harm, choose the one that causes least: five deaths are a greater harm than one.
The drowning child: helping distant people is a duty
If we can prevent something very bad without comparable sacrifice, we must: distance changes nothing.
Virtue
What matters is character: acting as a just and kind person would.
11 argumentsThe golden rule: do not do to others what you would not want done to you
Humans are close by nature: what is painful to me is painful to others too, so I can judge others by myself.
Virtue is a mean between two vices
Emotions can be felt too much or too little; like a good craftsman, we aim at the mean, which varies from person to person.
No one does wrong willingly
Nobody wants their own unhappiness or acts against what they judge best: wrongdoing comes only from ignorance of the good.
Better to suffer injustice than to commit it
Doing an injustice is a worse evil for the one who does it than for the one who suffers it.
What is dishonourable is never truly useful
The honorable is natural and the truly useful is natural; one action cannot be both against nature and in line with it.
The fable of the Troglodytes
A people where everyone thinks only of himself, with no sharing, judges or kept promises, destroys itself.
No virtue in obedience
Only virtue that comes from using one's own reason counts, and an education built on obedience prevents it.
Anger is never useful
Anger does not obey reason and does harm; whatever it might bring, reason can achieve alone.
A duty without a lawgiver makes no sense: back to the virtues
The word "ought" presupposes a divine lawgiver; without one it loses its sense, and we can speak of unjust or cowardly acts instead.
A different moral voice: the ethics of care
The interviews reveal a coherent morality of caring for real people, which Kohlberg's rights-based scale ranks lower.
Fish, bear's paw and righteousness: something matters more than life
If we loved nothing more than life, we would do anything to save it; yet many refuse, because they hold to righteousness.
Nature or conscience
The good is written in human nature or reason, not in an external command.
9 argumentsThe Euthyphro dilemma
The gods love the pious because it is pious; if their love made it so, the reasoning would go in a circle.
The natural law
What our nature inclines us toward, reason grasps as good: staying alive, raising children, knowing the truth.
Conscience, a divine instinct
All peoples share the same notions of good and evil, which neither upbringing nor self-interest can explain.
I rebel, therefore we are
Every act of revolt invokes a value that is not only one's own but shared by all: revolt founds solidarity.
Reason is the slave of the passions: morality is felt, not demonstrated
Reason alone never moves us to act, yet morality does move us to act: so it must come from feeling.
One can be good without believing in God
We can love doing good by inclination and upbringing, and experience shows that honesty makes us happier in this world.
Good is indefinable: the open question argument
For any definition of good, we can still ask "but is it good?", so the question is not empty.
The moral sense grew out of the social instincts
A highly social animal, once its intelligence is developed enough, regrets having yielded to a passing urge against its lasting instinct.
The impartial spectator: judging ourselves through a third party's eyes
Our little finger moves us more than a hundred million strangers; what makes us just is the eye of an impartial judge within.
God's will
The good comes from God: his commands, or faith, come first.
5 argumentsAbraham: faith above morality?
Abraham cannot justify himself to anyone, and being ready to kill his son counts as killing him: ethics cannot explain him.
The good is what God commands
God can command anything that is not contradictory, and theft or hating God are not: they are bad only because he forbids them.
Without God, everything is permitted
Without God or life after death, nothing truly binds us: only inclinations and calculations remain, and anyone may lack them.
Wrongness is being contrary to the commands of a loving God
Believers and non-believers share one concept of wrongness, and if God exists, what fills it best is what a loving God forbids.
God's will is the supreme rule of justice
Nothing is higher than God's will to judge it: so what he wills is just because he wills it.
Morality questioned
Our values have a history, or cannot be stated: they must be questioned.
10 argumentsThe ring of Gyges: would we be just if we were invisible?
If we could do wrong without ever being punished we would: we respect justice only out of fear of punishment.
"Justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger"
Every government makes laws in its own interest and calls "just" what serves it: so justice is the interest of the stronger.
The genealogy of morality
To judge the worth of our values we must know where they come from: the morality of good was born of the resentment of the weak.
"You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent"
Neither a human nature, a ready-made morality nor feelings settle it: only the choice itself decides.
To will one's own freedom is to will the freedom of others
Freedom is the source of all values; since other humans are freedoms too, to will one's own is to will theirs.
Ethics cannot be put into words
Words can only state facts, and no fact contains an absolute value, which is what ethics is about.
"Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice"
Our reason and conscience are shaped by custom, so we have no other yardstick to judge other peoples.
"Stealing is wrong" describes nothing: it is a cry of indignation
"Stealing is wrong" adds no fact to "you stole" and is not true by definition; such words express feelings.
There are no objective values: our moral judgements are all false
Objective values would be very strange things, and moral codes vary too much to come from perceiving them.
Moral luck: we are also judged for what is not up to us
We constantly judge people by outcomes beyond their control, and luck also shapes their character and circumstances.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.