Not a checklist. A centuries-long argument that different traditions are still having, differently.
Ethics as a field of study is often collapsed into whichever single theory is most familiar — usually harm reduction or a simple rule-following morality. But the discipline itself is a history of competing, incompatible answers to the same question: what makes an action right? The Homeric age judged action by honor and fate; the classical Greek tradition (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) shifted the question toward virtue and the good life; medieval and Islamic scholastic traditions grounded it in divine command and reason together; the Enlightenment tried to derive ethics from individual rational duty or aggregate consequence alone, stripped of any inherited tradition.
None of these fully displaced the others — they coexist, in tension, as live options rather than a settled sequence. That’s what makes “ethical and philosophical frameworks” plural in practice: evaluating whether something is worth building draws on more than one of these traditions at once, and no single theory, including utilitarianism, covers the whole field on its own.
Source: MacIntyre, A. A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century, 1966.