I think "ethics" and "morality" (and their cognates) are often used more or less interchangeably, both in ordinary language and philosophical discussions. However, there are some philosophers, such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Bernard Williams, among others, who draw a fairly sharp distinction between the two. On this view, morality refers to a particularly modern conception of ethics that emphasizes impartiality and juridical or deontic notions such as duty and obligation. By contrast, on this view, ethics focuses on what sort of life the agent should lead. This sort of approach justifies ethical concern from the agent's perspective outward and asks what sort of projects and commitments are worthwhile. Proponents of this conception of ethics often assume that the virtues play a larger or at least different role in ethics than in morality. Those who take this view contrast ethics and morality, defending the former and eschewing the latter. Of course, this contrast rests on substantive and potentially...

I’m not quite sure why you should find yourself struggling to convince many other people that killing a child to save others is or can be permissible. That is, I’m not sure what the context is in which you are thinking about this issue. But be that as it may, you are worried about a traditional issue in normative ethics. You are approaching the question in a traditional consequentialist mode, apparently thinking that killing is permissible, and perhaps required, provided that the killing has better consequences than not killing. If killing one saves five, then there is a consequentialist case for the permissibility or obligation to kill. However, deontologists who recognize the existence of rights, understood as side constraints on the pursuit of the good, would not agree. They would think that rights are independent of good consequences and constrain how we can permissibly pursue the good. They would likely say that it is wrong to take an innocent life even if the consequences of doing so are...

Utilitarianism, or more generally consequentialism, is one way to register the scalar character of morality, because actions will be more or less right depending on their proximity to the best. But other moral theories might also represent moral assessment as scalar. For instance, consequences will play a role on most plausible moral theories, and so most moral theories will often claim that all else being equal harming more is worse than harming less or that all else being equal helping more is better than helping less. For instance, if we think of the Humanity Formula of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, we might think that of two actions each of which treats others as mere means one is worse because it treats more people as mere means or treats them more flagrantly as mere means. Or, for instance, if we focus on Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean we might conclude that some actions are more vicious or at least less virtuous than others because they are even further from the mean that virtue involves.

Why not? Though I'm not exactly sure what you have in mind about having a liberal attitude toward sex, I can imagine having permissive views about sex among consenting adults -- views that permit sex outside of wedlock, sex outside of stable monogamous relationships, kinky sex, etc -- and thinking that abortion is generally impermissible except in limited cases involving such things as rape, incest, genetic deformity, or the health of the mother. One might have the liberal view about sex, perhaps because one values individual autonomy. But one might think that responsibility goes with autonomy, making one responsible for one's autonomous choices and their reasonably foreseeable consequences. In this way, one could combine a kind of liberal view about sex with support for some restrictions on the permissibility of abortion. I am not endorsing this combination of views, but I don't see that it need be unprincipled.

I think you have got some aspects of one central metaethical debate right. Some realists believe that (a) there are objective moral requirements and that (b) they are dictates of reason. There are those who deny this form of realism, because they deny (a) or (b) or both. But once we distinguish these two claims within some forms of realism, we can see the conceptual possibility of accepting (a) without (b) or (b) without (a). Anti-rationalists can accept (a) without (b), and various subjectivist views can accept (b) without (a). You ask about the anti-rationalist. The anti-rationalist says that objective moral requirements might apply to us even if it isn’t always or necessarily irrational to be immoral. According to the anti-rationalist, morality is one thing, rationality another. This requires us to distinguish two kinds of skeptical threats -- skepticism about the existence of objective moral requirements and skepticism about the rational authority of moral requirements. You seem to doubt...

We need to separate the legal question of whether your ability to count your contribution to charity as a charitable contribution for purposes of tax deduction should depend on your motives for contributing from the moral question about whether the moral status of your contribution should depend in some way upon your motives. There are a number of reasons why the tax status of your contribution probably should not depend on your motives. It's more plausible to suppose that the moral status of your contribution can depend on your motives. Your motives in contributing seem most relevant to our assessments of your character and perhaps to the question whether your contribution is genuinely charitable or beneficent. The crucial question is whether you make the contribution only because of the tax deduction or whether the tax deduction is just a happy by-product of a donation you would have made anyway. If I would not have made the contribution but for the tax deduction that does seem to raise questions...

Whether the law should regulate immorality, and not just harmful behavior, is the issue about whether legal moralism is defensible. A classical liberal view (sometimes associated with John Stuart Mill) is that liberty may be restricted to prevent harm, but not to enforce morality as such. In evaluating legal moralism, one important question is what would count as harmless immorality. Legal moralism used to be debated about whether the state should prohibit pornography or homosexuality. But, of course, it is questionable whether pornography or homosexuality is per se immoral. You mention the case of infidelity. It’s an interesting question whether infidelity causes harm. One might think so, in which case it presents questions of harm prevention, as well as legal moralism. Most would agree that it is immoral, but many liberals would deny that the state should regulate. A clearer case of harmless wrongdoing might be a case in which a minor promise is broken but with no ill effect or someone borrows...

That’s an interesting question about how to interpret and apply the universal law test of Kant’s categorical imperative. That test is supposed to apply to our maxims, and our maxims are our subjective ends or goals. So presumably an agent’s maxim is a psychological fact about an agent having to do with her aims. So I don’t think we always choose the most coarse-grained maxim – for instance, stealing – or always the most fine-grained maxim – stealing $10 to feed a blonde six-year old child on a Wednesday because of a lack of other options. It depends on what things the agent -- for instance, the child’s mother – is aiming at and what does guide her actions, and this may depend on the answers to counterfactual questions. Would she steal the money in any case? Would she steal food if this were available? If there were other, morally innocent ways of feeding her child (e.g. going to a soup kitchen or picking berries), would she do so? If the mother would have stolen even if her child was not hungry,...

Consider three kinds of cases in which my conduct, though beneficial to me, is harmful to others. In particular, let's assume that my conduct causes more harm to others than good to myself, and that I don't have any obvious right to the good. (1) The harm I cause falls on a small number of contemporaries. (2) The harm is spread out among a very large group of contemporaries, such that none of them is harmed significantly. (3) The harm is borne by future generations. One can imagine different versions of (3): (3a) the same sized harm is spread out among a very large future generation, or (3b) a significant harm is borne by each member of a large future generation. I take it that there is a good moral objection to causing the harm in each of these cases. But notice some practical differences. The harmed parties in (1) can normally be expected to complain loudly about the harmful behavior. But when the same sized harm is spread out, as in (2), there isn't the same incentive for individual complaint,...

The view you find attractive is usually called psychological egoism. It says that agents always act to promote their own interests and that self-interest is always one's ultimate motive. You mention two kinds of reasons for accepting this doctrine: that we always act on our own desires and that when we help others we do so to get the satisfaction of doing so. Let's look at these arguments separately. One reason that is sometimes given for accepting psychological egoism is that agents are always and necessarily trying to satisfy themselves when they act. Each of us has his own ideas about what is important in life, and these ideas shape our desires. When we act, we attempt to satisfy our desires. In this way, each of us always does what he wants. Even when we don’t like the way things turn out, it’s still true that we acted in the way that we wanted to at that time. This argument starts with a truism – that we always act on our own desires. It goes on to a substantive conclusion about the...