Ethics as an HL lens: Ethics is one of the three Higher Level lenses, with law and economics. This page starts it: what ethics is, and moral principles from cultures across the world that shape how people treat nature.
Practise this as you read
- Tell apart a factual question and an ethical question.
- Outline two ethical traditions from different parts of the world.
- Explain how ethics differs from the law.
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Right and wrong: Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies moral principles: which behaviours are right and wrong.
What ethics is
- Ethics is a branch of philosophy.
- It studies moral principles: beliefs about how people ought to behave.
- It asks which behaviours are right and which are wrong, and why.
- A factual question asks what is; an ethical question asks what we should do.
- Science can inform an ethical choice, but it cannot settle it on its own.
A factual question
- Asks what is, or what will happen
- How many horses live in the park?
- Answered by measuring and observing
An ethical question
- Asks what we ought to do
- Is it right to shoot them to save native plants?
- Answered by reasons about right and wrong
Real example: feral horses, called brumbies, roam Kosciuszko National Park in Australia. A 2022 survey counted about 19,000 of them; they trample bogs and streams where rare frogs live. The count is a fact. Whether shooting horses from helicopters is right, as the state approved in 2023 to reach a target of 3,000 horses by 2027, is an ethical question.
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Moral principles are found in every culture. Tap each card for one from a different part of the world.
Ubuntu, southern Africa
Ubuntu: a person is a person through other people, so right actions strengthen the community. Some writers extend the community to animals and the land.
Buddhism, Thailand
The first precept is to avoid taking life. From the late 1980s, monks in northern Thailand wrapped orange robes around trees to ordain them, so cutting them became a serious wrong.
The Bishnoi, India
A community in Rajasthan with 29 rules, including 'do not cut green trees'. At Khejarli in 1730, 363 Bishnois died hugging trees to stop soldiers felling them.
Maori, New Zealand
kaitiakitanga: people are guardians of the land, rivers and living things, with a duty to pass them on in good health.
Islam, worldwide
Humans are khalifa of the Earth: they may use it, but they must answer for how they treat it.
Jainism, India
ahimsa: harm no living being. Some Jain monks gently sweep the ground ahead of them so they do not tread on insects.
What the examples show
- Every culture has moral principles, but they differ from place to place.
- They differ most in who or what counts: only people, animals too, or the whole of nature.
- Many traditions treat nature as something to care for, not just to use.
- These principles guide behaviour: what people protect, eat, cut down or hunt.
- You need to know a variety of examples, not the details of each one.
Remember it as: Every culture asks 'what is right?'; they differ on who counts.
Ethics is not the same as the law, and it is not the same as values.
Ethics, law and values
- A law is a rule set and enforced by an authority, such as a government.
- A moral principle is a belief about right and wrong; no one has to enforce it.
- Something can be legal but seen as unethical, or illegal but seen as ethical.
- When enough people think a law is wrong, ethics can change the law.
- Values (what people think is important) feed into ethics (what people think is right).
Legal
- In 1973 the government of Uttar Pradesh, India, sold the right to fell trees in the Himalayan forests near Mandal.
- The logging was legal.
Seen as wrong
- Villagers, many of them women, believed the forests that gave them firewood, fodder and water must not be destroyed.
- They hugged the trees ('chipko' means 'to cling') so they could not be felled.
Law changed
- The protests spread for years.
- In 1980 India banned green felling in the Himalayan forests of Uttar Pradesh for 15 years.
Do not mix them up: 'It is against the law' answers a legal question. An ethical answer gives a reason why an action is right or wrong, such as harm to people, animals or future generations.
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How this comes up: Ethics is an HL lens, so it is asked inside other topics: an Outline [4] that needs named ethical examples, short Paper 1 parts on a case study, and 'Through the lens of ethics, suggest how...' [6] at the end of Paper 1. Name the tradition and say what it makes people do.
Moral principles about nature come from many cultures and religions.
Outline how two ethical traditions from different parts of the world guide the way people treat nature.
Model answer plan
See the mark-by-mark plan — for / against / judgement, with marking guidance — in study mode.
Write one point per paragraph: the principle in one, what it makes people do in the next. Each paragraph is then easy to find and credit.