Frameworks
Reference library
Eight core frameworks and four advanced / hybrid variants. Each card shows the guiding principle, key thinkers, strengths, common objections, and a worked mini-example.
Core frameworks
Utilitarianism
Maximize aggregate well-being.
An act is right insofar as it produces the greatest balance of well-being over suffering across all affected parties.
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Deontology (Kantian)
Some acts are forbidden, whatever the outcome.
Act only on maxims you could will as universal law, and treat rational agents always as ends, never merely as means.
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Virtue Ethics
Be the kind of person who acts well.
Right action is what a person of practical wisdom, exercising the virtues, would characteristically do in the situation.
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Social Contract Theory
Rules everyone could reasonably accept.
Moral and political norms are justified when they could be agreed to by free, rational persons choosing terms of cooperation.
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Care Ethics
Morality begins in relationships of care.
Moral action responds to the concrete needs of particular others within relationships of dependence and care.
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Ethical Egoism
Each ought to pursue their own long-run interest.
The right action for any agent is the one that best promotes that agent's own long-term self-interest, properly understood.
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Moral Relativism
Right and wrong are indexed to a framework.
Moral claims are true or false only relative to the norms of a culture, community, or individual — no framework-independent standard exists.
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Natural Law
Reason discerns goods proper to human nature.
Practical reason grasps basic human goods (life, knowledge, sociability, etc.); morality forbids acting directly against them.
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Advanced & hybrid
Rule Utilitarianism
Follow the rules whose general adoption maximizes welfare.
An act is right iff it conforms to a rule whose general acceptance would produce the greatest utility.
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Threshold Deontology
Duties bind — until catastrophe.
Deontological constraints are (near-)absolute in ordinary life but may be overridden when the consequences of adherence become catastrophic.
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Moral Particularism
Reasons don't behave like rules.
A feature that counts in favor of an act in one case may count against it in another; moral competence is skilled perception, not rule-following.
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Capabilities Approach
What are people actually able to do and be?
Justice requires securing for each person a threshold level of central human capabilities — the real freedoms to lead a flourishing life.
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