CONCLUSION

What is good?
What is right?
What is moral?

Philosophy cannot answer the question of what is good, right, or moral

This is the wrong question

Philosophy can only assume the good, etc., and then question its implications

            The good must be presupposed, i.e., it must be assumed at the outset:

"Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof."  J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism

Ethics

Components (elements)

(1) form: rational
(2) content: values/norms

Value is not derived from reason but is presupposed by it as its subject matter

 

The very structure of ethics dictates:

That instead of asking "What is good, etc.?"

Philosophy should ask "What values or ends are being presupposed and what are their implications?"

Results

A result of not realizing that different values have in fact been presupposed is that people frequently argue at cross-purposes

Different values inevitably yield different answers to the questions of morality and, as a  result, argument is largely futile
People are simply talking past each other

A result of philosophy’s inability to satisfactorily answer the fundamental questions of what is good, right and moral has been the development of various VIEWPOINTS:

Skepticism: the answer is unknowable

Amoralism: there is no answer to know

Relativism: there is a multiplicity of answers

These viewpoints may be consistent:
It may be that the answer is unknowable (skepticism)
Because there is no answer to know (amoralism).
Instead, there is a multiplicity of answers that are all equally possible (relativism). 
Anything at all can be assumed or chosen as an ultimate value.

“All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimate or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.”

    Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

If there is simply a multiplicity of values that can be assumed, then none of the various philosophies gives us the "TRUTH".
Rather, these philosophies can only give us various "truths"

Socrates - secular ethics is necessary to rescue theism from moral arbitrariness

Plato - practical truth that particulars come and go; only in the conceptual realm of universals can we find permanence and perfection

Aristotle - the doctrine of the mean

Buddha - desire carries with it dissatisfaction; our attitude toward the world will determine how we experience the world

Confucius - the political insight that society will benefit when "superior" people are in positions of influence

Hobbes - unchecked egoism is self-defeating; our own well-being requires us to be social and political beings

Hume, together with the feminists, notes the emotional aspect of our moral existence.  There is no disconnect between our moral life and our emotional life. 

Kant - in his analysis of duty captures the a posteriori fact that we tend to only deem actions morally worthy when they are done for the sake of principle.  Also indicates that insofar as we are fundamentally equal beings, rationally there is no ground for privileging ourselves or anyone else. 

Mill - ultimate values are without rational justification and the maximization of pleasure is dependent on the structure of our social institutions. 

Marx - humans are social beings who create their own history.  If we are to realize our own possibilities, we must consciously create that history.

Sartre - we have choices and must choose; we are condemned to be free and responsible for the history we create. 

Feminists - insofar as traditional ethical theory has not taken into account women's concerns and experience, it is inadequate and in need of the corrective feminist ethics can offer.

 

Once we understand what the actual practice of the philosophers has been, then we can make sense of the disparate conclusions they draw, viz., they are simply the outcomes of different sets of assumptions

"So once you know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means."  Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide