- branch of philosophy studying moral principles, right action, and the good life
- major frameworks:
- consequentialism: rightness determined by outcomes (utilitarianism: maximize well-being)
- deontology: rightness determined by rules and duties (Kant: categorical imperative)
- virtue ethics: rightness determined by character (Aristotle: cultivating excellence)
- care ethics: rightness grounded in relationships and responsibility
- applied ethics: bioethics, environmental ethics, AI alignment, digital rights
- metaethics: the nature of moral facts, moral realism vs. constructivism
- every culture encodes ethical systems through religion, law, custom, and mythology
- the alignment problem in AI is fundamentally an ethics problem: whose values, defined how
- cyber approaches alignment through transparent, consensus-driven knowledge ranking