I think ethics is an interesting study. However, using ethics to try to guide behavior is a waste of time. Basically, every ethical system has axioms. By changing your axioms, you can get your ethical system to justify or condemn any behavior you want.
So people end up doing the same thing, they just have more "logical" explanations of why their behavior is justified.
The axioms are however not arbitrary. Philosophers spend most of their time arguing about which sets of axioms and specific axioms are better than others. You should read up on it. They take great care in trying to avoid the pitfalls you're talking about.
That's kind of the point - philosophers spend most of their time arguing about which sets of axioms and specific axioms are better than others, there are many very different sets of axioms with very different conclusions and properties, and the choice of these axioms is essentially arbitrary, allowing you to get to pretty much any arbitrary conclusions.
You'd be able to say "The axioms are however not arbitrary" when (if!) philosophers have stopped arguing and the field of philosophy can say "for ethical axiom sets A-E, while having lots of earlier philosophical discussion, there's now a strong consensus in our field that they are wrong and flawed because of reasons, for any practical applications please ignore them and use axiom set F as that is the better one that addresses the known flaws in others". Currently, there's lot of philosophical discussion on ethics, but little of solid decisions and conclusions from these discussions; all the discussion is still at the stage of increasing ambiguity and introducing hypotheses instead of increasing our knowledge about reality by eliminating and discarding most of these hypotheses.
> Currently, there's lot of philosophical discussion on ethics, but little of solid decisions and conclusions from these discussions; all the discussion is still at the stage of increasing ambiguity and introducing hypotheses instead of increasing our knowledge about reality by eliminating and discarding most of these hypotheses.
I think greater use of formal methods could really help with this. Imagine if there was e.g. a Coq library containing formalisations of all the common systems of axioms, and the various conclusions that followed from them. It would make exploration so much easier.
Please don't call names and especially don't do personal attacks on HN. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of how wrong some other commenter is or you feel they are.
Most importantly, if you post like this, you forego the chance to explain a more correct view to the rest of us. We all miss out that way. Even worse, commenting like this discredits the truth that it's trying to express (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Of course it's extremely frustrating when someone is wrong on the internet, but it's all our job here to metabolize that frustration into something that doesn't make the situation worse.
Where to read up on ethics, you mean? Start with introductory textbooks and then move on to SEP or directly to papers (which both your texts and SEP will reference.)
You could start with this list [1] of resources. I'd like to add Practical Ethics by Peter Singer.
So people end up doing the same thing, they just have more "logical" explanations of why their behavior is justified.