Dedication and Acknowledgements
About this book
This book is an introduction to philosophical ethics intended for use in introductory college or high school level courses. It is designed to mirror the way I have taught Ethics at Pikes Peak State College over the past 20 years. I tend to teach philosophy to beginners and so there is a fair amount of discussion at the outset of some of the tools used by philosophers and of the ways in which their approach differs from that of their colleagues in other disciplines.
Instructors are encouraged to take advantage of the case studies in the final appendix. I have found that using one or two core case studies throughout the course is useful to students, allowing them to see how different ethical theories might work through the cases differently. I have also included an appendix on logical fallacies which the main text alludes to frequently.
This is an open educational resource, meaning that the author does not own copyright and is highly indebted to OER authors preceding this work. I am a strong advocate of the open source movement and philosophy. Knowledge is only ours to share. Yes of course writers, developers and publishers do hard work that deserves compensation. But intellectual property, it seems to me, can sometimes stand in the way of learning. Introductory textbook knowledge should free us and not sink us into debt.
Acknowledgements
The writing and publication of this book would not have been possible without the work of numerous people who make and share their amazing work in the open educational resource community. I am especially indebted to the framework provided by George W. Matthews in his Philosophical Ethics online textbook. Additionally I draw source material from other OER Ethics and Philosophy textbooks such as Ethics for A-Level by Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher, Introduction to Ethics by Noah Levin, Political Philosophy by Wiki Knights, Phronesis: An Ethics Primer with Readings by Henry Imler, A Philosophy Reader: Readings from the Classic Texts by Charles Durning Carroll, Ethics and Society by Deborah Holt, Introduction to Ethics by Manuela Gomez, and others. Selections from primary philosophical sources are taken from Project Gutenberg.
License CC BY NC-SA 4.0 
This book is released under a creative commons CC BY NC-SA 4.0 license. This means that this book can be reused, remixed, retained, revised and redistributed as long as appropriate credit is given to the authors. If you remix, or modify the original version of this open textbook, you must redistribute all versions of this open textbook under the same license.
