The attempts to answer it have led to many inquiries into the basis of human motivation, the sanction for morality, the possibility of disinterested action, and the proper organization of society. Situation ethics, which has come into prominence only recently, claims that the morality of an action depends on the situation and not on the application of a law to the case. Religious Ethics One of the main problems of moral philosophy is the connection between morality and religion. Religious moralists tend to claim that there can be no morality without religion, because without God there can be no reason to be moral. Philosophers as opposed as Mill and Kant held that religion rests on morality, since religion itself depends on the distinction between good and evil, an ethical concept.
Some philosophers distinguish between personal ethics and social ethics.
Personal ethics is taken as comprehending how one should act in relation to oneself, social ethics how one should act in relation to others. Such a distinction rests on differentiating between duties to oneself and duties to others, and one standard question of ethics is which of these is primary. In recent years some moral philosophers have returned to considering the questions of ethics in closer relation to those of political and legal philosophy. In the process new interest has developed on the nature of a just law, on whether one has a moral obligation to obey the law, and on whether law itself can be defined independently of morality. These are questions both in moral philosophy and in philosophy of law, as is the question of whether morality can be legislated, which is involved in disputes over racial integration and over legal restrictions on sexual relations and abortion.