There are two types of problems in ethics. First are perennial problems, ethical issues that are relevant in every age. Second are contemporary problems, those that are only relevant to one time and place.
Broad questions like "what is the best way to live life?" or "should one die by suicide?" or "does the ends justify the means?" or "what is free will?" are perennial. Specific questions like "should abortion be legal?" or "should transgender people have the right to choose their gendered pronouns?" or "should artificial intelligence be given rights?" or "should homosexuals be allowed to marry?" depend on the day and age, and thus are contemporary problems.
Thus, it should be clear that ethics is tied inextricably with political positions.
The very first philosophers were virtue ethicists. They tried to decide which characteristics of a person made life the best it could be. Socrates thought that the unexamined life was not worth living, so a life worth living must be examined. Walking blindly in the dark was not virtuous.
Aristotle held that all action lead to a universal good, which he called "happiness". To achieve happiness required that one walked the Golden Mean between two extremes, which were both vices. Courage is a virtue: too little courage is cowardliness, and too much is foolhardiness. Cowards and fools are vicious.
Stoics believe that one can only control one's own reactions to events, and therefore a person should be a master of their own emotions. The value of emotions has been held up for debate. Do emotions give us information, like what we value? If I learn that a friend in a distant country is gravely ill, my emotions might tell me that it is important to visit them. Guided by emotion, I can do all the rational things like book an airline ticket and hotel. My emotions tell me that I prize my friendships.
Cynics take stoicism to the extreme. They shed all ties that bind, and live lives of extreme physical renunciation. A famous Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, used to eschew all creature comforts and lived in a barrel. When Alexander the Great heard of this man, he went and asked him, "what can I get for you, O Great Philosopher?" to which Diogenes replied, "you can get out of my sunlight." (Apparently, Alexander once said, "if I were not Alexander, I would wish I were Diogenes" to which Diogenes quipped, "I agree: if I were not Diogenes, I would wish I were Diogenes, too.")
One could ask, instead of struggling to be virtuous in a world full of suffering, why live at all? Albert Camus said: "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." His answer was to point to the ancient Myth of Sisyphus. In the underworld, Sisyphus was punished with the inenviable task of pushing a huge boulder up a hill. Every time he neared the top, he would lose his grip on the boulder and it would tumble back to the base of the hill. Sisyphus would then have to start pushing the boulder up the hill again, for all eternity. The task of Sisyphus is what we should expect from life, and virtue is to imagine that Sisyphus is happy.
There are, apart from virtue ethics, more systematic theories of ethics. They split evenly on two sides of the question "does the ends justify the means?"
A consequentialist believes that consequences matter. How we get to the end is not important. An important type of consequentialism is utilitarianism, the belief that a person or society should maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is what "utility" refers to: pleasure. Some utilitarians believe that there are higher and lower pleasures. John Stuart Mill said that he would rather be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, just as he would rather be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the pig or fool is a different opinion, it's because they only know their half of the equation.
The opposite of a consequentialist is an intentionalist. These people believe that intentions matter, that the ends does not justify the means. A famous intentionalist is Immanual Kant, whose "deontology" prescribed the duties of humans. First, always act as though you could make a universal rule of your action. Second, always treat humans as ends-in-themselves. And third, act as though you were making universal laws for yourself and every other intelligent person.
Take the example of whether or not homosexuals should be allowed to marry. You might hastily assume that they should not, because if everyone chose not to procreate with someone of the opposite sex, the human race would go extinct. However, one could also say that we should always treat every homosexual as an end-in-themselves, not as a mere means to propagate the species. The rule should be "if someone is a homosexual, they should be allowed to have sex with other consenting homosexuals." Kant was an enlightened humanist, not a dogmatic bigot.
There is a further discipline of philosophy that deals with the examination of the vocabulary of ethics. This is known as meta-ethics. This is the study of questions like "what does it mean for an action to be good versus bad? or "how do you distinguish between good and evil?" Nietzsche argued that good and bad are the prototypes of ancient Greek philosophy, where people strived to live good lives instead of bad ones. He called this a "master morality". "Evil" is the invention of so-called "slave moralities", that attacked many of the healthy goods of master moralities, dubbing otherwise noble behaviours as sinful. Meta-ethics, therefore, tends to look at morality as historically-grounded, as something that can be unearthed in the fashion of archaeology.
Situationalists argue that ethics is almost entirely subjective. There is no objective good, bad, or evil, and the answers to questions of ethics always depends on the situation. The polar opposite to that is objective theories of ethics, a kind of moral realism that believes that morality is baked into reality, such as the dogmas of religion. The so-called "
For the time being, I will not discuss contemporary problems of ethics, or politics, but I think I have said enough that it is possible to imagine some arguments for these.