Abstract
Ethics is a branch of philosophy that attempts to answer the questions; what’s right? What’s wrong? And why? Ethical relativism is the thesis that ethical principles or judgments are relative to the individual or culture. Ethical egoism attempts to respond to the challenge of moral relativism by justifying that there is a universal principle for what actions are right and what are wrong. It is a form of consequentialism, which means it looks solely at the consequences of action to see if it is right or wrong. Utilitarianism is one of the best-known and most influential moral theories. Like other forms of consequentialism, its core idea is that whether actions are morally right or wrong depends on their effects. This paper lists This paper also explores numerous studies conducted on various facts behind the three disparate moral theories, aiming at providing a an adequate or workable foundation for ethics.

To begin with, ethical egoism is an inadequate moral theory as moral conflicts are not resolved in ethical egoism. This theory is based upon a nature shared by human beings, i.e., people are self-interested. People are generally motivated to reap benefits for themselves. To fully understand the inherent flaw in ethnical egoism, certain principles behind the theory are explored. As a normative theory, ethical egoism sets the principle of how we ought to act, and somehow, it encourages a sense of selfishness. According to Lawrence Hinman, ethical egoism asserts that everyone should always act in their own self-interests (105), this assertion is flawed because it arbitrarily assumes that an agent’s inherently private motives are selfish. A weak version of ethnical egoism accepts the possibility of altruistic or benevolent behavior, but maintains that, whenever an agent makes a decision to act, the action is by definition one that the agent wants to do at