Formal Ethics

Formal ethics is a formal logical system for describing and evaluating the form as opposed to the content of ethical principles. Formal ethics was introduced by Harry J. Gensler, in part in his 1990 logic textbook Symbolic Logic: Classical and Advanced Systems, but was more fully developed and justified in his 1996 book Formal Ethics.

Formal ethics is related to ethical formalism in that its focus is the forms of moral judgments, but the exposition in Formal Ethics makes it clear that Gensler, unlike previous ethical formalists, does not consider formal ethics to be a complete ethical theory (such that the correct form would be necessary and sufficient for an ethical principle to be "correct"). In fact, the theorems of formal ethics could be seen as a largest common subset of most widely recognized ethical theories, in that none of its axioms (with the possible exception of rationality) is controversial among philosophers of ethics.