  | Book Details Title: Ethics for Beginners: 52 “Big Ideas” from 32 Great Minds |
Book DescriptionThis 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. Customers Review:Peter Kreeft is a great modern philosopher who has taught philosophy at Boston College for more than 50 years. In Ethics for Beginners, Kreeft has written a clear, concise, profound and commonsensical introduction to ethics that is probably the best introduction to ethics available today. Here are just a few excerpts from his book.Philosophy: Studying the great ideas of the great philosophers will help you to think things through yourself, and to take responsibility for your own thoughts, and to open your mind to arguments on both sides of controversies. [Studying philosophy and critical thinking will help you take responsibility for your beliefs and values.]Philosophy: As Buddha said, “What we are is determined by what we think.” [One important reason to study philosophy is because are thoughts make us what we are. Philosophy will give you the correct worldview and the correct values, and it will teach you to think better, making you a better person.]Philosophy: Common sense should be a standard for philosophy and should judge philosophies, rather than philosophy be a standard for common sense and judging common sense. [Any philosophy that is contrary to common sense is contrary to reason and is therefore a false philosophy.]Ethics: So what qualifies you for ethical wisdom? It is not your ideological beliefs or scholarly expertise but your character traits. And those character traits come in pairs, so that it is very easy and very common to emphasize one half of each pair and forget the other one. These traits include:• Adamant, committed honesty and flexible, experimental open-mindedness;• A hard (logical) head and a soft (loving, empathetic) heart; toughness and tenderness;• Fair, unbiased, impersonal detachment and personal commitment and loyalty;• Impatience (passion) and patience (maturity);• Idealism and practicality; and• Profound seriousness and lightness, playfulness, and a sense of humor.Wisdom: In medieval philosophy, the greatest good was considered to be conforming one’s soul to objective reality by means of moral virtue and wisdom. In modern philosophy, the greatest good was the power to use technology to conform nature’s to man’s desires, “man’s conquest of nature.” [Wisdom is the right response to reality, and the right response to reality is to conform the soul to the requirements of reality. Conforming the soul to reality means making the soul in harmony with reality and obedient to reality.]Wisdom: All values make demands on us; they demand a response appropriate to what they are. We should value animals above rocks, people above animals, love about hate, etc., simply because of what they are. We ought to live rightly, to live according to reality, i.e., to give to everything of value the response that it deserves. This means to worship God, not human beings or things; to love and respect (i.e. treat as important) persons, not things, and to use things, not persons. To live rightly is to give everything the value response it deserves. It is a kind of three-R principle: Right Response to Reality. [Reality is good, and it deserves a proper response. Wisdom is the right response to reality.]Reason: In the realm of feelings we can see an essential distinction between (1) the non-rational feelings [feelings generated by intellectual intuition] we share with the other animals, such as contentment and discontent, pleasure and pain, fearfulness and boldness, and (2) the specifically human feelings, the “rational” feelings [feelings generated by abstract reasoning] such as compassion, generosity, hope, trust, courage, appreciation of beauty, and many forms of love as well as their negative opposites, such as cold-heartedness, stinginess, despair, mistrust, cowardice, insensitivity, and many forms of lovelessness. All these specifically human feelings of the human “heart” used to be classified as part of “reason” in the broader sense, for two reasons: first, irrational, sub-human animals could not experience them, and second, we naturally hold ourselves and each other responsible for these good and bad “rational” feelings, thus implying that we have at least some freedom and power to affirm or deny them, but we have neither power over nor responsibility for the “irrational” merely-animal feelings that are dependent wholly on the autonomic nervous system. Rousseau’s idolization of feeling is destructive, but it is a natural reaction to hard, narrow rationalism. A human without a heart is as inhuman as a human without a head [Note that there are four types of feelings: (1) non-rational positive feelings; (2) non-rational negative feelings; (3) rational positive feelings; and (4) rational negative feelings. We have little control over non-rational feelings, but we can control rational feelings. All feelings can result in attitudes, or our feelings about reality and our worldview and our thoughts. And note that rational feelings are part of reason and can be used in rational arguments.]Human Nature: When Aristotle defined man as “the rational animal,” he meant by “reason” all that distinguishes man from the beasts, including intellectual intuition [both immediate understanding and immediate abstracting of universals], moral conscience, aesthetic appreciation and creativity, and religious belief, not just logical calculation. [Note that another difference between man and animals is that animals do not have aesthetic appreciation, nor do animals create art. And intellectual intuition includes abstracting universals, which is immediate understanding of essences or natures.]Human Nature: According to Plato, man is by nature wise. For Aristotle, man is neither born virtuous (as in Rousseau) nor vicious (as in Hobbes and Calvin) but with a free will and is therefore open to both virtue and vice. We can only praise or blame ourselves, not society or fate or the gods, for our own personal virtues and vices. We are born neither with virtue nor intellectual wisdom, but with the capacity for both. Since we are not born with Platonic innate ideas, we must learn them from sense experience and then rise to wisdom by rational questions, abstraction and induction. – per Ethics for Beginners page 64 by Peter Kreeft [We can only praise or blame ourselves, not society or fate or the gods, for our personal virtues and vices.]Atheism: The opposite of the virtue of faith is deliberate unbelief. [Since faith is a virtue, then deliberate unbelief – atheism – is not only wrong but it is also a vice.]As you can see from the above excerpts, this is an outstanding introduction to ethics. Since ethics is important, so is this book. | |
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