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.
