What is ethics or moral philosophy? What fundmental question does it attempt to answer?

Question

And how is different from religion, law and morality? And why are sound arguments so essential to ethical reasoning?

Answer 1

Ethics is the study of morality and the nature of 'good'. That latter question is prickly enough that philosophers have filled whole books with that alone.

Yet it is probably worth that amount of study and more. Arguably if we ever figured out exactly what was and what was not good, we might be able to formulate our laws and our lives in such a way that they maximized the benefits we got out of them.

Most religions have made attempts at defining good... what distinguishes their views from philosophical ones is that their are generally dogmatic, 'divinely inspired', and not open to any kind of criticism (and sometimes not open to reason). Theologists tend to assume many things that a philosopher would not.

Laws likewise are an attempt at achieving good, though mostly they seem to be about suppressing bad instead. Here too we can see why sound, reasonable arguments are so important to ethics - where people have many different veiwpoints and many different religions, the one thing that they all (hopefully) share is a sense of reason. Laws must usually be built on compromise, and reason is often the best way to forge one.

Answer 2

There really are only three normative ethical theories; they are virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequentialism.

Virtue ethics is sometimes ridiculed by some philosophers as the ethical theory of 5 years old. There are strict defined rules for moral choices that we make like "don't kill" or "don't steal".

Deontological ethics is what Kant has developed. 'Categorical imperative' mandates action not because it benefits us nor because it is for greater good, but because it just is so. It is not our desire, it is not our hedonistic nature, but it is the honestly imagined maxim that we follow and that mandates morally right action. To Kant, this maxim is God.
One thing to keep in mind is that Kant's ethics is in direct contradiction with consequentialism.
For Kant, you cannot act as a mean to do greater good later on, but you always have to act what is good at that moment.
Say your kids are starving at home. You would like to steal a loaf of bread to feed your children. We all know that feeding your starving children is a good thing, but because it involves stealing as a mean to do good, this action is not justified.

Consequentialism is what you have touched upon, but it has to be said that there is another form consequentialism that is different from utilitarianism and that is egoism (further pursued as objectivism). It is precisely opposed to utilitarianism.

In consequentialism, there is no absolute moral values involved. Consequentialists believe that moral values naturally arose through time and evolutionary process. Therefore consequentialism is self-sustaining and self-developing ethics system unlike deontological ethics where there is absolute moral values.

Answer 3

They all struggle with the same questions... what is moral and what is not... what is lawful and what is not.

Answer 4

How should one live ones life?