Learn Ethics and Logical Fallacies: 100 Flashcards from the Trolley Problem to the Motte-and-Bailey

Most ethics courses teach the theories and leave you defenceless the first time someone smuggles a bad argument past you. Deck ZR7413 — Ethics and Logical Fallacies (100 cards) refuses that split: half moral philosophy, half the reasoning errors that surface whenever people argue about it.

Two halves, one skill

Cards 1–50 map ethics: the three branches (normative, meta, applied), the three normative families (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics), and the thought experiments that pull them apart. Cards 51–100 are a field guide to fallacies, formal and informal. The payoff: you can run the second half on the first — Appeal to Nature is the everyday version of the Naturalistic Fallacy, and the Moralistic Fallacy is its mirror.

Nine representative cards

Everything the 100 cards cover

On the ethics side: normative ethics, metaethics, applied ethics, act and rule utilitarianism, Bentham's principle of utility, deontology, moral absolutism, virtue ethics, phronesis, Stoic ethics, care ethics, ethical egoism, social contract theory, divine command theory and the Euthyphro dilemma, moral relativism, objectivism, particularism, skepticism, nihilism, moral luck, moral autonomy, supererogation, the doctrine of double effect, doing versus allowing, discourse ethics, the paradox of hedonism, the demandingness objection, Parfit's repugnant conclusion, Singer's drowning child, the trolley problem and its Fat Man variant, the lifeboat and Heinz dilemmas, the Ring of Gyges, Omelas, the survival lottery, the prisoner's dilemma and dirty hands.

On the fallacy side: straw man, ad hominem, poisoning the well, tu quoque, false dilemma, middle ground, slippery slope, appeal to authority, popularity, tradition, novelty, emotion, pity, fear, ignorance and consequences, begging the question, equivocation, no true Scotsman, hasty generalisation, anecdotal evidence, cherry picking, post hoc, false cause, gambler's fallacy, denying the antecedent, undistributed middle, composition and division, special pleading, loaded question, Nirvana fallacy, continuum fallacy, genetic and etymological fallacies, ecological fallacy, historian's fallacy, moving the goalposts, false equivalence, burden-of-proof reversal, proof by assertion.

Two tips that fit this deck

Study the fallacies in confusable pairs, not alphabetically. The deck deliberately includes mirror images: affirming the consequent / denying the antecedent, composition / division, tradition / novelty, naturalistic / moralistic, genetic / etymological. Review each pair side by side and force yourself to state the difference in one sentence before flipping.

Write your own example on every fallacy card. A fallacy you can only define is one you will miss in the wild. Add a one-line example from something you actually read this week — a headline, a comment thread, a sales page. The deck gives the pattern; your example gives the trigger.

Deck ZR7413 — Ethics and Logical Fallacies is in the Flip It library at flip-it.app. For the historical backbone behind these positions, pair it with our modern and contemporary philosophy study guide.