[lumberjack]

The philosophical aspect of ethics is not void of substance. There are many ways to think about the ethics of a situation. You learn different frameworks of ethical thought and you gain new perspectives. Some people who are very ideological will write this off as useless bullshit, but only because they are very invested in only one perspective and not open minded enough to consider the merits of other ethical frameworks.

To give you a programming analogy, it is as if you always programmed imperatively, using C, because you learned that organically as you grew up, and then you take this class and you learn about functional programming and object oriented programming and you learn how you can think of the same problem from a completely different perspective.

Except with the crucial difference, that the end result will not necessarily be the same and in fact there is not always a right answer. But when there is not always one right answer it is better to know many possible answers and why they are possible answers, than only one such answer.