Chapter 1: Ethics and the Examined Life

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world. – Albert Camus

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. – Albert Einstein

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate. -― C.G. Jung

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free. — Ralph Ellison

There is likely not a day that goes by without the need for coming to moral judgments. Should I vote for this candidate? Should I trust this person? Will this purchase make me happy? How will making this choice affect how others look at me?

But how do we reach these judgments? More likely than not we do so without much reflection. For most choices, this is probably fine. But what about more serious decisions? Should I support my friend’s choice to have an abortion? Do I report a neighbor for abusing her dog? Do I really support a government policy that limits rights or freedoms?

Questions like these require deeper moral reflection. It’s the aim of this textbook to help you to think through such moral choices, to come to moral judgments, but more importantly to give you the rational tools to help you reach those judgments. For it is only when we start to be more self-conscious about our moral reflection that we can come to some degree of confidence that our choices are right.