The Fundamentals of Ethics, true to its name, is a primer for the field of moral philosophy. It collects and analyzes some of the most important modern ethical theories in Western philosophy, all of which seek to answer the fundamental question of how humans ought to live. This is the goal of the field of ethics: to prove or dismiss the existence of unseen rules that guide human behavior. Shafer-Landau does not pretend to have an easy answer (or any answer at all) to this inquiry, yet it is clear that his objective in exploring value ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics is to provide readers with the necessary tools to begin thinking about the use of ethics on their own.

There are three distinct starting points for exploring morality, and The Fundamentals of Ethics allows readers to begin from any of them. Value theory is concerned with identifying the nature of well-being. It sees ethics as useful for understanding what is important to pursue for its own sake. For example, hedonism posits happiness (enjoyment) as the only intrinsically valuable pursuit in life, while the desire theory suggests it’s about fulfilling one’s wants. The next section of the book is about normative ethics, which sees the use of morality as a means to classify certain acts as right or wrong.