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date: 30 June 2022

Abstract and Keywords

‘Normative ethics’ is an enormous field. It is concerned with the articulation and the justification of the fundamental principles that govern the issues of how we should live and what we morally ought to do. Its most general concerns are providing an account of moral evaluation and, possibly, articulating a decision procedure to guide moral action. Though both these aims rely on articulating the correct set of moral principles that govern evaluation and that can also be used in articulating a decision procedure or rule, they are not coextensive. Recent critical work, especially on the part of particularists and virtue ethicists, has generated more pressure to separate clearly the two.

Keywords: normative ethics, moral evaluation, moral action, decision procedure, moral principles, virtue ethics

Julia Driver

Julia Driver is a Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in Philosophy from The Johns Hopkins University. Her main areas of research are normative ethics, moral psychology, and metaethics. She has published articles in journals such as the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Nous, Philosophical Studies, Utilitas, Ethics, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. She has written three books: the latest, on Consequentialism, was published in 2012 in Routledge's New Problems in Philosophy series.

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