Ethics for Beginners: Big Ideas from 32 Great Minds

Dr. Kreeft has done it again (for about the 80th time) in this book. Here are several exceptionally clear overviews of the most important ethical thinkers in the history of the West (and East!). I am teaching an introductory class to philosophy, with a heavy focus on ethics, at a university right now, and have found this book a goldmine for preparing lectures. The way he lays out each thinker makes their overarching vision transparent and thus gives one a great foundation for tackling their texts in more depth. Highly recommended.

It's just a set of short summaries of various philosophers but gives you a nice introduction to them and a starting point to go deeper if you want.

But, that doesn’t mean the truth is easy to find, accept, or most challengingly — live. Peter Kreeft gives inspiring vignettes on many ethical philosophers throughout the centuries and ages. They are introductory and very helpful in gaining a foundational understanding for the main tenets of each philosopher. Having only a B.A. in Philosophy, I still found this book challenging from an academic standpoint, but I also found it digestible... Couldn’t believe I finished it in less than a week. It was a phenomenal summary of ethics and helped me tie up loose ends from my B.A. almost 20 years ago. It helped me want to live out my ethical values AND dig deeper. An extremely beautiful gift from the author!!!

Deep and fun to read at same time. I need to read it again and get a hard copy. WOW

Simple

This book should be read by every high school student to arm themselves against today’s mind numbing college education. Yes, there were great minds in the past answering in depth life’s Great moral, ethical, and philosophical questions. But because of the color of their skin they have been largely ignored in the current age of stupidity. At the end of the book is an analogy based on the great science fiction book , “ A Canticle for Liebowitz “ These 2 pages alone are worth the price of the book!!!

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.

The preface is insulting and childish. If it is supposed to be cute, it fails. C’mon editors!! The tone of writing talks down. Another book by another prig. After I read the insipid summary of objective value from the Abolition of Man I realized this was a work of a mediocre writer, and sent it back.