Home
philosophy
Ethics for Beginners

Ethics for Beginners

Big Ideas from 32 Great Minds

by Peter Kreeft

195 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.70 in

Hardcover
9781587312335
Published: January 2020

$28.00

BUY

eBook
9781587312342
Published: January 2020

$28.00

BUY

Description
Contents

This is not a typical ethics textbook.

Most ethics textbooks are anthologies of articles by contemporary philosophers, or a whole book by one contemporary philosopher, about ethical puzzles to be solved by logical analysis. This is good mental exercise but it will not change your life, and you will not remember it ten years from now. You will not remember a hundred bright little ideas, you will remember only a few Big Ideas, the ones that changed your life. This book is about 52 of them..

And it is by 32 great philosophers. They are all dead. (Philosophers die, but philosophy does not; it buries all its undertakers.) Living philosophers who write ethics textbooks are usually very bright, but they do not include any name we know will live for centuries. Why apprentice yourself to second rate scribblers like me when you can apprentice yourself to the greatest minds in history? Why not learn from Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche? Why prefer little minds to big ones?

They disagree with each other, to be sure, but all of them will help you, not least those who contradict you and challenge you, and stretch you by forcing you to reply to them, and fight with them. I am appalled by the fact that 90% of the best philosophy students at the best universities, which say they cultivate "diversity," have exactly the same politically correct opinions, whether of the Left or the Right.

When you were a child your mother probably reminded you before you went out not to forget something like your lunch box or your umbrella. Ethics today is usually treated that way: as an afterthought: check with an ethicist before doing the really important things like business or law or medicine or diplomacy. But ethics is not a P.S. to life. It is about the most fundamental things in life: values, good and evil. Socrates said that a good person does not worry much about little things like whether he lives or dies, but only about big things like whether he is a good person or a bad one.

32 ETHICAL GURUS

1. One anonymous sage: the Rta/Tao/Logos, Four Sages from the East

2. The Hindu Tradition: The Four Wants of Man

3. Buddha: Nirvana

4. Lao Tzu: Nature’s Way

5. Confucius: Social Harmony Three Sages from the West

6. Moses: Divine Law

7. Jesus: Agape Love

8. Muhammad: “Islam” Three Classic Greek Founders of Philosophy

9. Socrates: the Primacy of Wisdom (“Virtue is Knowledge”)

10. Plato: a, No double standard: ethics and politics; b. Platonic ideas: the objective reality of goodness; c. Justice as health of soul and therefore always profitable

11. Aristotle: a.Happiness as the end, the greatest good; b. Virtue as the road to happiness; c. The good as teleological; d. The golden mean as the key to virtue; e. Ethics as dependent on metaphysics; f. The (later) idea of “natural law”

Three Lesser but More Popular Ancient Philosophers

12. Protagoras

13. Epicurus: Hedonism

14. Epicurus: Stoicism Three Medieval Christian Saints

15. St. Augustine: a. Love as gravity; b. Only two kinds of people; c. The restless heart

16. St. Anselm: The Good greater than which nothing can be thought

17. Thomas Aquinas: a. The role of faith and reason; b. Four kinds of law; c. The four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues; d. Eight candidates for happiness

Three Modern Political Philosophers

18. Machiavelli: the good as the practical

19. Hobbes: the good as power

20. Rousseau: the good as feeling

Three Classic Modern Ethical Alternatives

21. Hume: the good as subjective

22. Kant: a. The good as goodwill; b. Goodwill as duty; c. Duty as the “categorical imperative”

23. Mill: Utilitarianism: the good as maximally happy consequences

Three Existentialists

24. Kierkegaard: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Religion

25. Nietzsche: a. The genealogy of morals as resentment; b. The Superman: “beyond good

and evil”, c. “The will to power”

26. Sartre: a. God vs. freedom; b. Love vs freedom