Abstract

The ethics of everyday life may sound mundane. However, while it is most certainly, and appropriately, mundane in the sense of being rooted in the material world, it is not mundane in a second sense - dull, or lacking interest. Ethical questions about our daily lives are, or at least should be, of great interest to us all. Moreover, many of the specific views I shall defend about everyday ethical issues are far from commonplace. That does not mean that they are either extreme or needlessly provocative. Instead, ordinary thinking about everyday ethics, much like ordinary thinking about other ethical questions, is often mired in convention and oversimplification. Any attempt to think freshly, with nuance, and without an ideological agenda, is likely to lead not only to unusual views about each particular question, but also to an unusual constellation of views about the different questions. Quotidian ethics Practical ethics is the area of philosophy devoted to asking and responding to practical moral questions. It is distinguished from other areas of moral philosophy, which focus on more theoretical questions, such as (i) those concerning the nature of morality (the domain of metaethics), and (ii) what makes some actions morally right and others morally wrong, or which character traits are virtues, and which are vices (the subject matter of normative ethical theory)