Ethics for Dummies - Adam Potthast

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Résumé :

Introduction 1

About This Book 1

Conventions Used in This Book 2

What You're Not to Read 3

Foolish Assumptions 3

How This Book Is Organized 4

Part 1: Ethics 101: Just the Basics, Please 4

Part 2: Surveying Key Ethical Theories 4

Part 3: Applying Ethics to Real Life 4

Part 5: The Part of Tens 4

Icons Used in This Book 5

Beyond the Book 5

Where to Go from Here 6

Part 1: Ethics 101: Just the Basics, Please 7

Chapter 1: Approaching Ethics: What Is It and Why Should You Care? 9

Knowing the Right Words: The Vocabulary of Ethics 10

Focusing on should and ought 10

Avoiding the pitfall of separating ethics and morality 11

Putting law in its proper place 12

Identifying Two Arguments for Being Ethical 14

Why be ethical 101? It pays off! 14

Why be ethical 201? You'll live a life of integrity 15

Committing Yourself to the Ethical Life 16

Taking stock: Know thyself 16

Building your moral framework 17

Seeing where you need to go 18

Chapter 2: Butting Heads: Is Ethics Just a Matter of Opinion? 21

Subjectivism: Basing Ethics on Each Person's Opinion 22

Right for me and wrong for you: The subjectivist position 22

Recognizing that subjectivism can't handle disagreement 23

They're always right: Subjectivists make bad houseguests 25

Determining what subjectivism gets right 26

Cultural Relativism: Grounding Ethics in the Group's Opinion 27

Discovering what it means to be a cultural relativist 27

Understanding why cultural relativism is always so popular 28

Living in many worlds: Some problems with cultural relativism 29

Looking at cultural relativism's lack of respect for tolerance 30

Noting cultural relativism's successes 32

Emotivism: Seeing Ethics as a Tool of Expression 33

Expressing yourself: Booing and cheering in ethics 33

Arguing emotionally: A problem for emotivists 34

Getting motivation right: A victory for emotivism 36

Chapter 3: Exploring Connections between Ethics, Religion, and Science 37

Clarifying the Relationship between God, Religion, and Ethical Codes 38

Knowing the difference between God and religion 38

Contemplating the diversity of religious ethical codes 39

Because God Said So: Understanding Divine Command Theory 41

God's authority: Considering why God gets to be in charge 42

Figuring out what happens when divine commands conflict 43

Plato's big challenge: Questioning what makes something ethical 45

When Ethics Gets in the Way of God: Introducing Kierkegaard 47

The Abraham dilemma: When God tells you to kill your child 47

Embracing a God who's beyond ethics 49

Overcoming your despair: Can faith take you beyond ethics? 49

When God Gets in the Way of Ethics: Introducing Nietzsche 51

Portraying religion as an ethics of weakness 51

Leaping over faith: Ethics as inner strength rooted in self-creation 52

Examining Nietzsche's new idea: The ethics of inner strength 54

The Age of Science: Figuring Out If Ethics Can Exist in a Secular World 55

Staying silent on the spiritual 55

Defining ethics in a materialistic world 56

Establishing good behavior without heaven or hell 57

Evolution and Ethics: Rising Above the Law of the Jungle 58

Seeing how selfish genes can promote unselfish behavior 59

Noting the irrelevance of (most) evolutionary theory to ethics 61

Part 2: Surveying Key Ethical Theories 63

Chapter 4: Being an Excellent Person: Virtu...