Moral and ethical theories are systems which attempt to provide reason, guidance, or judgement of an action or non-action. The system attempts to make a statement about whether an action is moral or immoral, just or unjust, often with the goal is for the vast majority, ideally everybody, to conform to a given moral theory so that the best, most ethically sound world would come into existence. The topic of my essay will be to develop a balance between opposing moral theories. I will not be developing a moral theory of my own, but creating an account of some, but not necessarily all, key characteristics that would, arguably, be necessary for a moral theory to possess in order to not fall to contradiction or other such fallacy while still refraining from contradicting general intuition about the vast majority of subjects, cases, and dilemmas. Addressed issues, and questions, may consist of, or relate to, isolating which factors are critical in determining the moral obligation of a situation, such as aggregate utility, respect for persons and their natural rights, and equality. Other such important distinctions shall relate to consequentialism, and the importance of agent centered prerogatives. No attempt will be made in determining the specifics of the function or moral correctness of a moral theory which conforms to characteristics that will be addressed, merely an account will be made of the ideal and appropriate characteristics of the best possible moral theory.
One of the dominating normative ethical theories in popular use, or thought, is that of consequentialism. Consequentialism is a type of moral theory that states that the only things that matters are the consequences of an action. This has a number of very obvious flaws which are critiqued by other theorists, and in a moral theory which is ideal as possible must be avoided. If the best, most agreed upon, intuitively correct, aspects of different theories can be conjoined whilst the largest, most obvious, flaws of such theories are avoided, then perhaps a system can be derived which is easily and readily agreeable to the majority.
