Ethics
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50 free Ethics trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ethics is the part of philosophy that asks how we ought to live: what makes an act right, what we owe to other people, and whether a promise can ever be broken for a good reason. Those questions are thousands of years old, and they still decide how hospitals, laboratories, newsrooms and boardrooms are run. This quiz covers the ground an introductory ethics course does. It tests the main ethical systems and the vocabulary that goes with them, the philosophers who argued them into shape, and the thought experiments lecturers love. It also reaches into applied ethics, with the experiments and scandals that changed what is expected of doctors, researchers and companies. It suits a college student revising for a test, a teacher who needs a ready-made round on ethical theory, or anyone who enjoys a moral puzzle. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something, and the questions can be printed for use on paper.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which thought experiment from Philippa Foot asks whether to steer a runaway vehicle away from five people and onto one?
The trolley problem
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.
Q 02In Plato's Republic, the Ring of Gyges tests whether anyone would stay just by granting its wearer which power?
Invisibility
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.
Q 03Which NBC comedy stars William Jackson Harper as Chidi, a dead professor of ethics and moral philosophy?
The Good Place
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.
Q 04Which philosopher's preserved body, called his 'auto-icon', is on public display at University College London?
Jeremy Bentham
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.
Q 05In Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments at Yale, what did volunteers believe they were giving a fellow volunteer?
Electric shocks
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.
Q 06Which Greek physician gives his name to the ancient oath of medical ethics, though modern scholars doubt he wrote it?
Hippocrates
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.
Q 07Which science fiction writer devised the Three Laws of Robotics, which begin by forbidding a robot to injure a human?
Isaac Asimov
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.
Q 08Which principle, found in most religions, tells people to treat others as they would like to be treated themselves?
The Golden Rule
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.
Q 09Which Athenian philosopher is said to have declared at his trial that the unexamined life is not worth living?
Socrates
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.
Q 10Which university's psychology building housed Philip Zimbardo's mock prison experiment, halted after only six days?
Stanford
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.
Q 11Which German philosopher held that it would be wrong to lie even to a murderer asking where a friend is hiding?
Immanuel Kant
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.
Q 12Which ethical theory holds that the best action is the one producing the greatest happiness for the greatest number?
Utilitarianism
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.
Q 13Which Greek philosopher taught that each virtue is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency?
Aristotle
Q 21Which approach to ethics, named from the Greek for duty, judges an act by the rules it follows, not its results?
Deontology
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.
Q 22Which position in ethics holds that right and wrong vary between cultures, with no universal standard to judge them?
Relativism
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.
Q 23Which ancient school of philosophy, followed by the emperor Marcus Aurelius, is named after a painted porch in Athens?
Stoicism
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.
Q 14Which philosopher wrote in Leviathan that life without government is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'?
Thomas Hobbes
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.
Q 15The Tuskegee Study tracked hundreds of Black men for 40 years while withholding treatment for which disease?
Syphilis
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.
Q 16Which woman's cancer cells, taken without permission at Johns Hopkins, became the first immortal human cell line?
Henrietta Lacks
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.
Q 17Which set of research principles, born from the trial of Nazi doctors, calls voluntary consent 'absolutely essential'?
The Nuremberg Code
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.
Q 18Which former US First Lady chaired the United Nations committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
Q 19Which Houston energy company collapsed over hidden accounting fraud, taking its auditor Arthur Andersen down with it?
Enron
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.
Q 20Which 1950s NBC quiz show, where Charles Van Doren became a star champion, was later exposed as rigged?
Twenty-One
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.
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.
Q 24Which practice, named from the Greek for 'good death', means intentionally ending a life to end pain and suffering?
Euthanasia
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.
Q 25Which word for selfless concern for others was popularised, and possibly coined, by French thinker Auguste Comte?
Altruism
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'.
Q 26Which view holds that pleasure is the only thing good in itself, a position usually traced to Aristippus of Cyrene?
Hedonism
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.
Q 27Which of the three main branches of ethics studies the nature and meaning of moral judgments themselves?
Metaethics
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.
Q 28The English word 'ethics' has its roots in the ancient Greek word 'ethos', which carried which meaning?
Character
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'.
Q 29Which name for a whole family of moral theories did Elizabeth Anscombe coin in her 1958 essay 'Modern Moral Philosophy'?
Consequentialism
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.
Q 30Which Greek word, often translated as happiness or flourishing, named the highest human good in ancient ethics?
Eudaimonia
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.