ABSTRACT
The root of all ethical enquiry is what is ‘good’. Moral judgement is bound up with some notion of proportionality and it is the desire to attain some sort of moral symmetry between competing views that guides moral thinking. Moral doubts occur when the negative aspects of the means seem greater than the positive aspects of the ends. Duty-based theories propose that some things are right or wrong irrespective of their consequences. According to duty-based theories, the most important thing about moral action is its application according to a deeper inner sense of responsibility to the wishes of God or to ethical standards deemed unassailably right. Utilitarianism was a view formulated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism also suffers from the same ethical vacuity as the categorical imperative. An ‘ethical relativist’ would say that nothing is absolutely right or wrong.
