A philosophical theory which holds that moral judgments are simply expressions of positive or negative feelings.

1. An intellectual movement in modern Europe from the sixteenth until the eighteenth centuries that believed in the power of human reason to understand the world and to guide human conduct.

2. For Buddhists, the state of Enlightenment or nirvana is the goal of human existence.

A moral theory that, in its most common version (universal ethical egoism) states that each person ought to act in his or her own Self-interest. Also see Psychological Egoism.

The view that what is good or bad, right or wrong can be defined in terms of the natural property of an action (eg its consequences, its natural origin,) and this is in principle observable or measurable (eg happiness or natural law).

Sometimes referred to as intuitionism, the proposition that ethical statements refer to some non-definable property of goodness or badness which we know by intuition, not observation (just as yellow is a non-definable property of colour). This is usually associated with the philosophy of G.E. Moore in Principia Ethica. Here he argues that good, like yellow, is a simple indefinable property of an action (simple, because it cannot be broken down into constituent parts).

The explicit, philosophical reflection on moral beliefs and practices. The difference between ethics and morality is similar to the difference between musicology and music. Ethics is a conscious stepping back and reflecting on morality, just as musicology is a conscious reflection on music.

A person's ethnicity refers to that individual's affiliation with a particular cultural tradition that may be national (French) or regional (Sicilian) in character. Ethnicity differs from race in that ethnicity is a sociological concept whereas race is a biological phenomenon.

The is the word that Aristotle uses for happiness or flourishing. It comes from the Greek eu, which means happy or well or harmonious, and daimon, which refers to the individual's spirit.