Thomas White’s book introduces the most important ethical theories with relatable examples drawn from student life. This makes it the most engaging introduction to applied ethics there is.

Jussi Suikkanen,
University of Birmingham

One of the best introductory books to practical ethics I’ve encountered. White’s Right and Wrong not only distils the subtlest and most complex issues into clear, accessible, but still sophisticated prose. It’s also current, not only in terms of philosophical theory but also in the examples he deploys, carefully drawn as they are from real university students struggling with real life.

Peter Fosl,
Transylvania University, Kentucky

This greatly improved and expanded second edition of Right and Wrong introduces students to the major traditions in Western philosophical ethics and provides them with a basic methodology for identifying ethical issues and resolving ethical dilemmas. The cases analyzed throughout have been carefully chosen to reflect the lives of undergraduate students—they are all contributed by students, and are taken from major challenges in university life, such as academic dishonesty, partying, and relationships.

As a result of an increased interest in virtue ethics and the ethics of care, these areas now have their own treatment, in addition to the teleological and deontological approaches explored in the original volume. The new edition also features a significant strengthening of the discussion of Kant, and an expanded and revised discussion of utilitarianism. The final chapter applies the methodology developed in the book in an extended analysis of two cases. This not only illustrates how each of the approaches studied can illuminate a unique aspect of a situation, but also demonstrates the way in which students might apply ethical theory to practice in their everyday lives.

One of the major challenges of writing an applied ethics book is selecting cases. Humans have such a proclivity for behaving badly that there is never a shortage of examples from which to choose. However, because new scandals crop up on virtually a daily basis, cases quickly become dated and obsolete. In this book, I aim to get around that problem by using ethical dilemmas that represent constants in university life. Matters of academic dishonesty, partying, and relationships (more prosaically, “sex, drugs, crib, and cheat”) are as central to the student experience now as they were in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Virtually all of these cases are genuine ethical issues that some student or other faced. They were submitted through a website I created (ethicsoncampus.com) in a way that guaranteed students’ anonymity. In order to further respect students’ privacy, any names cited and certain details of the cases have been changed. More cases were submitted than I could use in the book, so I have posted them on the site in case anyone would like to use them in their classes. Ideally, the site can be a useful, ongoing source of cases that reflect ethical issues students currently face. Faculty teaching with this book should feel free to encourage their students to post cases; students are more than welcome to do so on their own.

Because one of the individuals involved in the case decided which facts to report and how to describe the circumstances, it is obviously possible that cases are tilted in favor of the students submitting them. In working with these cases, however, I’d encourage taking them at face value so as not to be sidetracked from the ethical issues they contain.

I am grateful to a number of people whose assistance was critical to the success of this project. Jeff Dean (formerly of Wiley‐Blackwell, currently at Harvard University Press), with whom I had worked on my In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier, was the initial champion of this book. Liam Cooper and then Marissa Koors subsequently shepherded the project to completion. The anonymous reviewers whom my editors selected provided me with sage guidance. I am especially grateful to two groups of students. First, the students from the variety of colleges and universities who submitted cases. Pride of place, however, goes to the students in my Honors ethics course at Loyola Marymount University who let me “test drive” an earlier version of this book with them. As always, I depended greatly on the patience and support of my wife, Lisa Cavallaro. Finally, as is recognized in this book’s dedication, I wish to thank my agent, Jeff Herman, for a partnership of more than thirty years.

• Kirk has an upper‐level physics class in which the homework is extremely difficult. His professor has made it clear that in doing the problems “you may use only your brain and your book.” Kirk can solve the most difficult problems, however, only if he gets help from his friend Jasmine. Kirk doesn’t ask for the answer. He asks for just enough help so he can understand the problem and solve it on his own. His friend’s assistance throughout the semester allowed Kirk to understand the material. As a result, he did well in the course. If he had followed the letter of his teachers’ rules, he wouldn’t have learned as much. He may even have failed the course.
• Sasha and Crystal are good friends. One day, Crystal said, “I need to tell you something, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.” Nodding, Sasha listened as her friend explained that she just discovered that a boy she hooked up with had a girlfriend. Crystal had no idea he was dating anyone, but at the end of the night, he looked at her and said, “You know I have a girlfriend, right?” Crystal was not only mortified, but disgusted and furious. If she had known he was involved with someone, she would never have hooked up with him. Unfortunately, as Crystal describes how the hook up happened in the first place, Sasha realizes that she knows the guy (Ron)—and the girlfriend he cheated on, Melissa, who is another one of her friends.

  Because Sasha is friends with both girls, she has a major dilemma. She promised Crystal not to tell what happened. But because she is Melissa’s friend, she feels an obligation to protect her from someone who is hurting her. From this perspective, she thinks that Melissa is entitled to know that Ron cheats on her.

  After agonizing over the dilemma, Sasha decided to keep her word and to say nothing. She didn’t know what kind of understanding Melissa and Ron had, and she didn’t know that Melissa would actually want to know. She also felt she should not meddle with a personal relationship. Within a few weeks, Melissa and Ron broke up. Subsequently, Melissa discovered that Ron cheated on her many times during their relationship. Sasha then felt she had to confess to Melissa that she knew about one of the times. Melissa felt that Sasha had let her down as a friend, and it took a while before their relationship was repaired.

• Marco came back to his dorm room one night to find one of his suitemates, Kevin, so drunk that he was incoherent. A mutual friend had just brought him back early from a party because Kevin was clearly unable to take care of himself. Marco said he’d look after him. It quickly became clear, however, that Kevin was so incoherent that Marco wondered whether alcohol was the only cause. He needed to decide if he should call for professional medical help, or just handle things as though his friend was just very drunk.

  What stopped him from immediately calling for help is that Marco has other friends who were taken away in an ambulance after getting too drunk and then received a bill for over a thousand dollars. Afterwards, they were very angry that someone called an ambulance when they just could’ve slept it off. That’s what made this such a dilemma for Marco. Should he put his suitemate in that deep a financial burden to be absolutely sure he’d be OK, or should he treat him like a typical drunk friend and just send him to bed with water and a trashcan and lay him down on his side?

  Marco decided not to call an ambulance. He put Kevin to bed and kept an eye on him all night. The next day Kevin was extremely hungover and had forgotten almost everything about the party. The one thing he did remember was that he did not have enough to drink to get that drunk. Marco and Kevin also learned that two other people at that same party had gotten just as incoherently drunk as Kevin, which led them to think someone put something into open drinks. The other two students got ambulances called for them and subsequently received huge bills. They were especially upset because they were the victim of somebody drugging their drinks.

  Kevin thanked Marco profusely for protecting him from a big bill. Nonetheless, looking back on the night, Marco thinks he should have called the ambulance. He feels that he should have put a friend’s health above everything else, because the risk for not doing so could have been catastrophic.

Here we have some dilemmas common to university life. What’s your reaction to how they were handled?

• Kirk broke the teacher’s rule by getting help from Jasmine. But is it really cheating when all he’s trying to do is to learn the material? If he needed help, couldn’t he have gone to the professor and received the same sort of assistance?
• Sasha is caught in the middle. She feels she has clear—and conflicting—obligations to both of her friends. Did she do the right thing?
• Marco wants to protect Kevin’s health, but he worries that if he overreacts, he’ll be responsible for his friend getting a huge, unnecessary bill. In retrospect, Marco thinks he made the wrong choice, even though Kevin ended up OK. Do you agree?

As different as they are, what these cases have in common is that they’re all ethical dilemmas. Kirk, Sasha, and Marco were faced with trying to decide what the right thing to do was. Technically, Kirk broke his professor’s rule. But was that wrong in his situation? Would it have been wrong for Sasha to break her promise to Crystal in order to protect Melissa? Did Marco have a greater duty to protect his friend’s health than Kevin’s bank account?

Such discussions about right and wrong put us squarely in the part of philosophy that evaluates how people act. We call it ethics or moral philosophy. This book will introduce you to this branch of philosophy for the purpose of helping you learn how to analyze the morality of actions and to make judgments about moral dilemmas in a sophisticated, rigorous, and clear‐headed way.

Chapter 1 will begin with a general discussion about ethics—what it is and how it’s done. We’ll move on to discuss the foundations of ethics and develop what we might call an ethical yardstick—a basic standard we can use in evaluating actions (Chapter 2). We’ll take a careful look at the two primary philosophical approaches to using this yardstick in practice (Chapter 3, “Measuring Consequences” and Chapter 4, “Evaluating Actions”). Then we’ll consider two approaches to ethics different from the dominant philosophical traditions (Chapter 5, “Virtue Ethics and the Ethics of Care”). We’ll next talk about why we should worry about the ethical character of what we do (Chapter 6, “Doing Right: Why Bother?”). Finally, we’ll apply what we’ve learned to a few cases (Chapter 7, “Ethical Dilemmas”).¹

With patience, you’ll learn a new way to evaluate what you and other people do and a new method of making decisions about ethical dilemmas. In fact, this book’s goal is to introduce you to a world that’s invisible and intangible and to show you that you can weigh, measure, juggle, and manipulate intangibles as easily as if they were chairs and tables.