Unifying Ethics

How can respect for diversity, honesty, responsibility and other desirable attitudes, values, and behavior be encouraged? Providing a response to the ethical challenge, this book presents five approaches to ethical evaluation, and each approach is grounded respectively in consequences, virtues, deontology, intuition, and tradition.

Unifying Ethics provides a simple yet powerful response to the ethical challenge of our time: How can respect for diversity be encouraged, but also honesty, responsibility, and other desirable attitudes, values, and behaviors be encouraged? The book presents five approaches to ethical evaluation. These approaches are grounded respectively in consequences, virtues, deontology, intuition, and tradition. The book draws upon a previously developed list of the human science phenomena to perform a reasonably exhaustive survey of ethical questions. An "ethical core" is identified, comprising statements for which all five types of ethical analyses suggest the same conclusion. Connections across ethical issues are addressed throughout Unifying Ethics, suggesting that it is possible and desirable for societies to live in accordance with the propositions of the "ethical core."