50 Fun Facts About Ethics

Which thought experiment from Philippa Foot asks whether to steer a runaway vehicle away from five people and onto one?

The trolley problem began as an aside in a 1967 essay on abortion and the doctrine of double effect. Foot's tram driver had to choose between five workers on one track and a single man on the other.

In Plato's Republic, the Ring of Gyges tests whether anyone would stay just by granting its wearer which power?

Invisibility lets the shepherd in the tale seduce a queen, murder the king and take the throne of Lydia. Glaucon tells it to ask whether anyone would resist doing wrong if sure of never being detected.

Which NBC comedy stars William Jackson Harper as Chidi, a dead professor of ethics and moral philosophy?

The Good Place kept two real philosophy professors, Pamela Hieronymi of UCLA and Todd May of Clemson, as consultants so that its afterlife lessons would hold up.

Which philosopher's preserved body, called his 'auto-icon', is on public display at University College London?

Jeremy Bentham left orders to be dissected and then kept as his own memorial. His guiding axiom was that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong.

In Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments at Yale, what did volunteers believe they were giving a fellow volunteer?

Electric shocks were what the volunteers thought they gave, and 65% went all the way to 450 volts when told to carry on. In reality there were no shocks, and the suffering 'learner' was an actor.

Which Greek physician gives his name to the ancient oath of medical ethics, though modern scholars doubt he wrote it?

Hippocrates has a second claim taken from him too: the line 'First, do no harm', so often quoted as part of the pledge, appears nowhere in the original text.

Which science fiction writer devised the Three Laws of Robotics, which begin by forbidding a robot to injure a human?

Isaac Asimov introduced the laws in his 1942 short story 'Runaround'. Many of his later plots turn on robots obeying them in ways that nobody intended.

Which principle, found in most religions, tells people to treat others as they would like to be treated themselves?

The Golden Rule got its name surprisingly late: the term spread in early 17th-century Britain through Anglican theologians and preachers, with the earliest known use in 1604.

Which Athenian philosopher is said to have declared at his trial that the unexamined life is not worth living?

Socrates is said to have spoken the line after choosing death over exile. Found guilty of impiety and corrupting the young, he carried out the sentence himself by drinking hemlock.

Which university's psychology building housed Philip Zimbardo's mock prison experiment, halted after only six days?

Stanford was meant to host a two-week simulation in the basement of Jordan Hall. It ended on day six, after a visiting psychologist objected to the guards' growing brutality.

Which German philosopher held that it would be wrong to lie even to a murderer asking where a friend is hiding?

Immanuel Kant argued that a maxim is only moral if everyone could follow it as a universal law, which left lying no exceptions. Neighbours were said to set their watches by his daily walks.

Which ethical theory holds that the best action is the one producing the greatest happiness for the greatest number?

Utilitarianism even came with arithmetic: its founder devised a 'felicific calculus' for working out how much pleasure or pain a given action is likely to produce.

Which Greek philosopher taught that each virtue is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency?

Aristotle set the doctrine out in his Nicomachean Ethics. After Plato died he left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, became tutor to the young Alexander the Great.

Which philosopher wrote in Leviathan that life without government is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'?

Thomas Hobbes called that lawless condition a war of all against all. His remedy was blunt: only a strong, undivided government could keep people from it.

The Tuskegee Study tracked hundreds of Black men for 40 years while withholding treatment for which disease?

Syphilis could be cured with penicillin by 1947, yet none of the infected men were given it. A whistleblower's leak to the press ended the study in 1972, and a presidential apology followed in 1997.

Which woman's cancer cells, taken without permission at Johns Hopkins, became the first immortal human cell line?

Henrietta Lacks was being treated for cervical cancer in 1951 when the samples were taken. Her family was not told that the HeLa line existed until 1975.

Which set of research principles, born from the trial of Nazi doctors, calls voluntary consent 'absolutely essential'?

The Nuremberg Code grew out of the 1947 verdict against Karl Brandt and 22 others. The judges took a six-point memo on legitimate medical research and expanded it to ten points.

Which former US First Lady chaired the United Nations committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Eleanor Roosevelt said the text might become 'the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere'. The General Assembly adopted it in Paris in 1948 without a single vote against.

Which Houston energy company collapsed over hidden accounting fraud, taking its auditor Arthur Andersen down with it?

Enron was the largest bankruptcy reorganisation in US history at the time. The scandal produced the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, which raised penalties for destroying records and defrauding shareholders.

Which 1950s NBC quiz show, where Charles Van Doren became a star champion, was later exposed as rigged?

Twenty-One coached its players so closely that the games were almost choreographed. Robert Redford retold the scandal in his 1994 film Quiz Show, with Ralph Fiennes as Van Doren.

Which approach to ethics, named from the Greek for duty, judges an act by the rules it follows, not its results?

Deontology took on this meaning only in 1930, when C. D. Broad used the term that way in his book Five Types of Ethical Theory. It is sometimes simply called duty-based ethics.

Which position in ethics holds that right and wrong vary between cultures, with no universal standard to judge them?

Relativism builds on a very old observation. The Greek historian Herodotus noted that each society regards its own beliefs and way of doing things as better than all others.

Which ancient school of philosophy, followed by the emperor Marcus Aurelius, is named after a painted porch in Athens?

Stoicism was first known as Zenonism, after its founder Zeno of Citium. He taught in the Stoa Poikile, a public colonnade decorated with mythic and historical battle scenes.

Which practice, named from the Greek for 'good death', means intentionally ending a life to end pain and suffering?

Euthanasia was first used as a medical term by Francis Bacon in the 17th century. He meant an easy, painless, happy death, with the physician easing the sufferings of the body.

Which word for selfless concern for others was popularised, and possibly coined, by French thinker Auguste Comte?

Altruism appeared in French around 1830 as 'altruisme', introduced as the opposite of egoism. Its root goes back to the Latin 'alteri', meaning 'other people' or 'somebody else'.

Which view holds that pleasure is the only thing good in itself, a position usually traced to Aristippus of Cyrene?

Hedonism has a built-in catch that Henry Sidgwick named the 'paradox of hedonism'. The rational way to reach pleasure, he argued, is to put it out of sight and not aim at it directly.

Which of the three main branches of ethics studies the nature and meaning of moral judgments themselves?

Metaethics asks second-order questions, such as how anyone can tell good from evil at all. 'What should I do?' is a question for normative ethics instead.

The English word 'ethics' has its roots in the ancient Greek word 'ethos', which carried which meaning?

Character, or personal disposition, was the sense of the Greek 'ethos'. The word reached English by way of the Latin 'ethica' and the Old French 'éthique'.

Which name for a whole family of moral theories did Elizabeth Anscombe coin in her 1958 essay 'Modern Moral Philosophy'?

Consequentialism got its name from a critic. Anscombe coined the word in a 1958 essay, objecting that the view excuses people from bad results they can claim not to have foreseen.

Which Greek word, often translated as happiness or flourishing, named the highest human good in ancient ethics?

Eudaimonia literally means the state of having a good spirit: it joins 'eu', good or well, to 'daimon', a spirit or deity. Welfare and well-being are other frequent translations.

Which English philosopher argued in On Liberty that power may be used over a person only to prevent harm to others?

John Stuart Mill was taught Greek at the age of three. He wrote the essay with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, who died suddenly in 1858, the year before it was published under his name.

Which Australian philosopher wrote Animal Liberation and likened ignoring famine to walking past a drowning child?

Peter Singer wrote the famine essay in response to the starvation of refugees from the Bangladesh Liberation War. In his example, muddy clothes are a trivial price for saving a child's life.

Which American philosopher asked readers to choose a society's principles from behind a 'veil of ignorance'?

John Rawls set the idea out in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. Behind the veil nobody knows their own ethnicity, social status or gender, so nobody can tilt the terms their own way.

Which German philosopher contrasted 'master morality' with 'slave morality' in On the Genealogy of Morality?

Friedrich Nietzsche argued that slave morality grows out of 'ressentiment', the grudge the weak feel toward the powerful, which turns the values of the strong upside down.

Which Chinese sage of the Analects taught 'Do not do unto others what you do not want done to yourself'?

Confucius described himself as a 'transmitter who invented nothing'. His aphorisms were gathered into the Analects only many years after his death.

Which Greek philosopher ran a school called the Garden and taught that the greatest pleasure is freedom from pain?

Epicurus was no glutton: he and his followers were known for eating simple meals among friends. The goal he set was 'ataraxia', an untroubled state free from all pain or suffering.

Which thinker coined the phrase 'the banality of evil' after covering Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker?

Hannah Arendt had fled Germany herself during Hitler's rise to power. The phrase first appeared as the subtitle of her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Which thinker, far better known as an economist, wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments about human sympathy?

Adam Smith published the book in 1759, long before his famous one. It supplied the ethical underpinnings for The Wealth of Nations, which followed in 1776.

Which Russian-born novelist named her philosophy Objectivism and wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness?

Ayn Rand said her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged demonstrated 'a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest'. Born in Saint Petersburg, she moved to the United States in 1926.

Which psychologist used the story of Heinz, who steals a drug for his sick wife, to map six stages of moral reasoning?

Lawrence Kohlberg cared less about whether people answered yes or no than about how they justified it. His theory adapted earlier work by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.

Which Scottish philosopher first argued that claims about what ought to be cannot simply be inferred from what is?

David Hume noticed that writers on morality slide from 'is' to 'ought' without explaining the step. The thesis that no such leap is valid is now nicknamed Hume's guillotine.

Which Dutch philosopher's Ethics, published after his death, is laid out like geometry, with axioms and proofs?

Baruch Spinoza wrote the book in Latin between 1661 and 1675. Shortly after he died in 1677, his works were placed on the Catholic Church's index of prohibited books.

Which economist argued in a New York Times essay that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits?

Milton Friedman held in the 1970 essay that a company is responsible only to its shareholders, who can then decide for themselves which social causes to support.

Which of the four principles of biomedical ethics set out by Beauchamp and Childress underlies informed consent?

Autonomy has been called the 'first among equals' of the four. Together they are nicknamed the Georgetown principles, after the university where both authors were based.

Which medieval theologian set out a famous account of natural law in the Treatise on Law, part of his Summa Theologiae?

Thomas Aquinas sorted law into four types: eternal, natural, human and divine. Natural law, he held, is the way rational creatures take part in the eternal law.

Which author imagined Omelas, a joyful city whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child?

Ursula K. Le Guin won the 1974 Hugo Award for Best Short Story with the tale. She chose the city's name after seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon, in a car mirror.

Which philosopher's Fear and Trembling uses Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac to ask whether faith can override ethics?

Søren Kierkegaard published the book in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, 'John of the Silence', a narrator who admits that he cannot understand faith himself.

Which dialogue by Plato asks whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or the reverse?

Euthyphro, the man the dialogue is named for, proposes that the pious simply is whatever the gods love. The puzzle now sits at the heart of arguments over divine command theory.

Which British philosopher named the 'naturalistic fallacy' in Principia Ethica, his book on what 'good' means?

G. E. Moore charged philosophers with the fallacy whenever they tried to define good in terms of natural properties such as pleasant or desirable. The book appeared in 1903.

Which American psychologist, regarded as the originator of the ethics of care, wrote In a Different Voice?

Carol Gilligan argued in the 1982 book that men and women tend to view morality in different terms. Harvard University Press calls it 'the little book that started a revolution'.