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Learn Ethics

Reason carefully about right and wrong, and see why thoughtful people disagree.

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Ethics, or moral philosophy, studies how we ought to live and act. It works on three levels: normative ethics, which proposes theories of right action; applied ethics, which tackles specific questions such as animal welfare, medical decisions or business conduct; and metaethics, which asks what moral claims are and whether they can be true. Beginners usually start with three classic theories: the consequentialism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant's ethics of duty, and Aristotle's virtue ethics. Learnr builds a course of short lessons that test each theory against real dilemmas, without telling you which one is right.

How to learn Ethics, step by step

Learn to lay out a moral argument. Write arguments as premises and a conclusion, then mark which premises are factual and which are moral. Many ethical disagreements turn out to hinge on one unstated premise, and finding it is the core skill of the subject.
Study consequentialism first. Utilitarianism, from Bentham and Mill, holds that the right act produces the best overall outcome. Learn act versus rule utilitarianism and the classic objections, such as cases where maximizing happiness seems to require punishing an innocent person.
Then learn Kant's ethics of duty. Kant argued that morality rests on reason, not outcomes. Study the categorical imperative in its two best-known forms: act only on rules you could will to be universal, and never treat people merely as means. Test it on his famous case of lying to a murderer at the door.
Add virtue ethics and other approaches. Aristotle asks what kind of person to be, with each virtue a mean between extremes, as courage sits between cowardice and recklessness. Then look at care ethics, social contract theory and religious ethical traditions, which start from different places again.
Work through classic dilemmas. Use the trolley problem, introduced by Philippa Foot in 1967, and its variants, Peter Singer's drowning child argument, and Robert Nozick's experience machine. Apply each theory to each case, and note where your intuitions clash with the theory you prefer.
Practice with short scenarios regularly. Ethical reasoning improves with repetition. A daily Learnr lesson that poses a short dilemma and asks how each theory would answer it builds the habit of reasoning before reacting.

What you'll learn

Distinguish normative ethics, applied ethics and metaethics
Explain and apply utilitarianism, Kantian ethics and virtue ethics
Analyze moral dilemmas such as the trolley problem with more than one theory
Build and evaluate moral arguments, spotting hidden premises
Discuss contested issues fairly by stating the strongest case on each side

What's inside your Ethics course

A sample path Learnr builds for Ethics. Your real course adapts to your goal and level.

1. What ethics is and how moral arguments work
2. Consequentialism and utilitarianism
3. Duty, rights and Kant's categorical imperative
4. Virtue ethics and care ethics
5. Metaethics: relativism, realism and moral knowledge
6. Applied ethics: medicine, technology, animals and business

How long does it take to learn Ethics?

The three main theories, the basics of metaethics and several applied topics take about 6 to 10 weeks at 2 to 4 hours a week. Reading primary texts such as Mill's Utilitarianism or Kant's Groundwork carefully takes longer but deepens understanding.

What you need before you start

Nothing required. Comfort following an argument step by step helps, and a short introduction to logic or critical thinking makes the material easier.

Common mistakes to avoid

Treating ethics as mere opinion. Learn to give reasons and test them, since some moral arguments really are stronger than others.
Picking a favorite theory early and dismissing the rest. Apply every theory to hard cases to see where each one struggles.
Confusing what people do believe with what they should believe. Keep descriptive claims about attitudes separate from normative claims about right and wrong.

How Learnr builds your course

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Ethics questions, answered

What is the difference between ethics and morality?

In everyday speech the words are often interchangeable. Philosophers sometimes use morality for the actual rules people live by and ethics for the systematic study of those rules and how they are justified.

Is ethics part of philosophy?

Yes. Ethics is one of the main branches of philosophy, alongside logic, epistemology and metaphysics. Learnr also has a broader philosophy course if you want to explore those other areas.