A large percentage of ethics discussions break down over disputes over definitions and the lack of common terms and concepts. This section contains some useful tools to permit analysis, discussion, and argument to go forward, and to provide a quick reference for readers when one or more of these appear in the Ethics Scoreboard.

Ethicists and scholars will find them overly spare; readers who overdosed on this kind of thing in college will regard them as excessive. The ethicists and scholars will be right, but Ethics Scoreboard visitors can readily find more thorough and authoritative expositions on the topics that follow on the web sites listed in the Links Section.