Debates

• Issues of moral philosophy are something on which people constantly disagree. In our own time, hugely controversial ethical issues include abortion, animal welfare, the environment, capital punishment, nuclear weapons, homosexuality and poverty. Any of these can be guaranteed to start a debate or a hot-tempered argument, and none of them are simple black-and-white issues.
  
  Political and business ethics affect our lives in big ways. Many countries have laws specifically to monitor political ethics and in the business world there are national and international organizations dedicated to upholding high standards [Reference 1]
  
  

Concepts

• When we discuss where our concepts come from and what they mean -- why we think something is right or wrong -- we are using metaethics, trying to get an overview of the subject. We use normative (rule-making) ethics to decide on the moral standards we will implement, while the debates on particular issues like those given above are called applied ethics.
  
  

Decisions

• We use all three forms of moral philosophy in our ethical decision-making without thinking about it, for all kinds of issues. Maybe we're tempted to drink-drive or maybe we want to rob a bank. Both are ethical issues. Perhaps our decision will be based on whether we can get away with it, but that's bad moral philosophy. A truly ethical decision would consider the effects on other people and society as a whole plus the longer-term effects on ourselves.
  
  

Greeks

• Discussion of what makes something good or bad, right or wrong, goes back to the ancient Greeks, whose thinking still influences us today. Some of their philosophers asked whether moral values were only relative to their time and place or whether they had absolute, divinely given, value and were therefore eternally true. We still ask that question. Also like us, they were concerned with practical matters of law-making, and so normative and applied ethics played a big part in their thinking.
  
  

Christianity

• These questions eventually passed into Christianity, and over the centuries Christian thinkers wrestled with them. In the centuries when the church used scripture and its own traditions to decide what was right and wrong the average person could simply accept what they were told and get on with life.
  
  But nowadays we are much better educated and live in a more secular world. The law of the land lays down the bedrock of our moral philosophy, such as laws about killing or stealing, but as individuals we all have to apply the notions of right and wrong, good and bad, to our own lives.