Part 1 of 7 in Marianne Talbot's "A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners". In this episode we examine moral dilemmas, moral truth and moral knowledge, freewill and determinism.

Freedom, knowledge and society: the preconditions of ethical reasoning

In this introduction to ethics, we shall be considering the underpinnings of ethical thought. We shall consider, for example, what it is for an action to be right or wrong, whether we can have moral knowledge and whether freewill is essential to morality. We shall reflect on four key ethical theories (virtue ethics, deontology, non-cognitivism and utilitarianism), looking at both their strengths and their weaknesses. We shall be looking at morality in the context of the individual and the

context of society.