If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Have you ever wondered if there’s a universal yardstick for right and wrong, or is morality just a product of our culture and upbringing?
- Are you curious about whether it's actually possible to live a truly ethical life in a world full of conflicting interests?
- What if you could master the tools of philosophical thinking to navigate life's toughest moral dilemmas with total clarity?
Listen to Ethics — Free Audiobook
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Key Takeaways from Ethics
- Understand how you inherit your deepest ethical preferences from your surrounding culture, yet retain the power to actively shape that moral climate.
- Discover why taking your society's ethical climate for granted is dangerous, as many of history's worst atrocities stemmed from distorted moral environments.
- Learn to recognize how we evade ethical responsibility and dismiss moral philosophy whenever our personal comfort and the status quo are threatened.
- Identify three common threats used to undermine ethical thinking: the 'death of God,' moral relativism, and the cynical belief that humans are fundamentally selfish.
- Find out why you don't need a supernatural authority to ground moral principles, as humans are entirely capable of building shared ethical codes together.
Learning Tools
Reinforce what you learned from Ethics
Mind Map
Ethics by Simon Blackburn
The Nature of Ethics
Definition and Origins
Why We Avoid It
Three Threats to Ethics
The Death of God (Secularization)
Relativism
Evolutionary Selfishness
Three Ethical Theories
Deontology (Rule-based)
Consequentialism (Results-based)
Virtue Ethics (Character-based)
Quiz — Test Your Understanding
Question 1 of 8
Why do people often attempt to evade ethical thinking, according to the text?
Ethics — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Ethics, or moral philosophy
Chapter 3: Three dangers to ethics
Chapter 4: Three moral theories
Ethics Summary & Overview
Ethics: A Very Short Introduction (2001) does exactly what it says on the tin: it’s a clear and accessible introduction to the branch of philosophy that’s concerned with how we ought to treat each other. By exploring key challenges and theories within ethics, Simon Blackburn cuts through philosophical jargon so we can learn to think clearly about how we ought to behave.
Who Should Listen to Ethics?
- Beginners looking to get started with philosophy
- Cynics secretly wondering if an ethical life is even possible
- Altruists who want to live more ethical lives
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