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Slide 01
Ethics
- The Study of What We Ought to Do, and Why
- Moral PhilosophyJusticeVirtueConsequentialismDeontology
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Slide 02
What Is Ethics?
- Ethics is the branch of philosophy that asks: How should we live? What makes an action right or wrong? What do we owe each other? These are among the oldest and most urgent human questions.
- Three Fundamental Questions
- Normative ethics: What is the right thing to do?
- Metaethics: What does "right" even mean? Are moral claims objectively true?
- Applied ethics: How do these principles apply to abortion, war, AI, climate?
- Why It Matters
- Moral philosophy is not merely academic. Every legal system, every policy decision, every major personal choice involves moral reasoning -- whether acknowledged or not. Understanding the frameworks makes that reasoning more coherent and less arbitrary.
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Slide 03
Virtue Ethics: The Ancient Tradition
- The oldest systematic ethics in the Western tradition. Developed by Plato and Aristotle, it asks not "What should I do?" but "What kind of person should I be?"
- Aristotle's Eudaimonia
- The good life is eudaimonia -- flourishing or well-being. Not pleasure, not wealth, not honor, but the excellent exercise of our distinctly human capacities: reason, social life, and virtue. Virtue is a habit, not an inspiration.
- The Golden Mean
- Each virtue is the mean between two vices. Courage: the mean between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity: between miserliness and profligacy. This is not mediocrity but excellence -- hitting the right mark in the right circumstances.
- Virtue as Habit
- "We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts." Character is built through repeated action. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act but a habit.
- Phronesis
- Practical wisdom -- the master virtue that governs the exercise of all others. Knowing not just what is generally right but what is right in this particular situation with this particular person at this particular moment.
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Slide 04
Consequentialism: Outcomes Are What Matter
- Right actions are those that produce the best consequences. The most influential form is utilitarianism, developed by Jeremy Bentham and refined by John Stuart Mill.
- Bentham's Calculus
- Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832): "It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." Pleasure is intrinsically good, pain intrinsically bad. Morality is a calculation: maximize net pleasure, minimize net pain. His felicific calculus attempted to quantify happiness.
- Mill's Refinement
- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) distinguished quality of pleasures: "Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." Intellectual pleasures are higher than physical ones. He also argued that utility, properly understood, is compatible with justice and individual rights.
- "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness."John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863)
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Slide 05
Deontology: Duty and the Moral Law
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that morality is grounded in reason, not consequences. What makes an action right is whether it accords with the moral law -- the categorical imperative.
- The Categorical Imperative (Formula 1)
- "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." If you cannot universalize your action without contradiction, it is wrong. The test: could everyone do this?
- The Formula of Humanity
- "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, always as an end and never as a means only." People have dignity that must not be violated -- even for good outcomes.
- The Kingdom of Ends
- A third formulation: act as if you were a legislating member of a kingdom of ends -- a community of rational beings who treat each other as ends. This grounds cosmopolitan and democratic ethics.
- Perfect and Imperfect Duties
- Perfect duties (never lie, never murder) admit no exceptions. Imperfect duties (charity, self-improvement) allow discretion in how they are fulfilled. The distinction explains why some violations feel worse than omissions.
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Slide 06
The Trolley Problem and Its Variants
- Phillipa Foot's thought experiment (1967) became the most discussed scenario in moral philosophy. It reveals deep tensions between consequentialist and deontological intuitions.
- The Trolley Problem
- A runaway trolley is heading toward five people who will be killed. You can divert it to a side track where it will kill one person. Should you pull the lever?
- Most people say YES. This seems consequentialist: 5 > 1.
- The Footbridge Variant (Judith Thomson)
- The same trolley, but now you are on a bridge above the tracks. The only way to stop it and save five is to push a large man off the bridge onto the tracks, killing him. Should you push?
- Most people say NO -- even though the math is identical. Why?
- The divergence reveals the doctrine of double effect (intending harm vs. foreseeing it as a side effect) and the distinction between using someone as a means vs. redirecting harm.
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Slide 07
Social Contract Theory
- What are the foundations of political authority and our obligations to the state and to each other? Social contract theorists ground morality and politics in a hypothetical agreement among rational agents.
- Hobbes: Leviathan (1651)
- In the state of nature, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Rational self-interest leads us to agree to a sovereign authority. Morality is the product of convention, not natural law. The contract justifies almost any stable sovereign.
- Locke: Natural Rights (1690)
- We have natural rights to life, liberty, and property that pre-exist the state. Government is legitimate only insofar as it protects these rights. If it violates them, we have a right to revolt. Foundation of liberal democracy.
- Rousseau: The General Will (1762)
- Humanity is naturally good; society corrupts. The Social Contract seeks a form of association that preserves natural freedom while creating genuine community. The "general will" -- what we would will as citizens, not merely as individuals -- is the basis of legitimate law.
- Rawls: Justice as Fairness (1971)
- What principles of justice would rational people choose from behind a "veil of ignorance" -- not knowing their place in society? Rawls argues: the liberty principle and the difference principle (inequalities must benefit the least advantaged).
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Slide 08
Rawls and the Veil of Ignorance
- "No one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like."John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
- The "original position" behind the veil of ignorance is the most influential thought experiment in 20th-century political philosophy. It operationalizes impartiality: design society's rules before you know who you will be.
- The Two Principles
- First: Each person has equal basic liberties, compatible with equal liberties for all
- Second (Difference Principle): Social and economic inequalities must be arranged to benefit the least-advantaged members of society
- Why It Matters
- Rawls gave philosophers a rigorous, non-utilitarian framework for thinking about justice, redistribution, and equal opportunity. His work dominates Anglo-American political philosophy and has influenced constitutions, legal theory, and development economics globally.
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Slide 09
Care Ethics: An Alternative Tradition
- Developed by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings in the 1980s as a critique of the "justice" orientation dominant in moral philosophy, care ethics centers relationships, context, and response to particular others.
- Origins and Key Claims
- Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982) argued that Kohlberg's stages of moral development were based on male subjects and privileged abstract justice over relational care. Many people -- often but not exclusively women -- reason morally through relationships and responsibilities.
- Morality is primarily about caring for particular others
- Context and relationship matter, not just abstract principles
- Vulnerability and dependency are morally central, not aberrations
- Critique of Traditional Ethics
- Traditional theories (Kantian, utilitarian) model the moral agent as autonomous, rational, and impartial -- an idealization that ignores human embeddedness in relationships and dependencies. Care ethics starts from the reality of human vulnerability and the fundamental importance of caregiving relationships.
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Slide 10
Metaethics: What Kind of Thing Is Morality?
- Before asking what is right, we can ask: what is "right"? Are moral claims true or false? If true, how? These metaethical questions profoundly affect how we think about moral disagreement.
- Moral Realism
- Moral facts exist independently of what anyone believes. "Torturing innocents for fun is wrong" is objectively true -- as true as "the Earth orbits the Sun." Defended by Shafer-Landau, Parfit, Nagel.
- Expressivism
- Moral statements express emotions or attitudes, not beliefs. "Torture is wrong" means roughly "Boo torture!" Not false, but not truth-apt either. A.J. Ayer, Simon Blackburn (quasi-realism).
- Error Theory
- J.L. Mackie: moral statements purport to be objectively true, but nothing in the world makes them so. All moral claims are false. Moral facts would be "metaphysically queer" entities.
- Constructivism
- Moral truths are constructed by rational procedures or agreements among agents. Rawls and Korsgaard: morality is what rational beings would endorse under ideal conditions. True, but human-made.
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Slide 11
Divine Command Theory and Natural Law
- For most of human history, ethics was grounded in religion. Two major traditions emerged that still influence contemporary moral and legal thinking.
- Divine Command Theory
- An action is right because God commands it; wrong because God forbids it. Morality is entirely dependent on God's will. Objection (Plato's Euthyphro dilemma): Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? If the former, morality seems arbitrary; if the latter, goodness is independent of God.
- Natural Law Theory
- Aquinas: morality is grounded in human nature and discoverable by reason. God created us with a rational nature oriented toward certain ends (life, knowledge, sociality, religion). Acting in accordance with these ends is good; acting against them is wrong. Influenced Catholic moral theology and international law.
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Slide 12
Contractarianism vs. Contractualism
- A crucial distinction in modern ethics that is often confused.
- Contractarianism (Hobbes, Gauthier)
- Morality is what rational, self-interested agents would agree to for mutual advantage. The basis is prudence: we follow moral rules because it is in our long-term interest to do so. Morality is a cooperative strategy for rational egoists. No agreement = no obligation.
- Contractualism (Scanlon, Rawls)
- Morality is what principles no one could reasonably reject if they were motivated not by self-interest but by a concern to justify their actions to others. T.M. Scanlon's famous formulation: "An act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles that no one could reasonably reject."
- The difference: contractarians ground ethics in rational self-interest; contractualists ground it in reasonable agreement among people who care about mutual justification.
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Slide 13
Moral Intuitionism
- "Moral intuitions serve as evidence about the moral facts, exactly as perceptual beliefs serve as evidence about the physical world."Ross, The Right and the Good (1930)
- W.D. Ross (1877-1971) argued that we have direct, non-inferential moral knowledge through intuition. No single principle (utility, duty) captures morality. Instead, we have prima facie duties that can conflict.
- Ross's Prima Facie Duties
- Fidelity, reparation, gratitude, non-maleficence, beneficence, justice, self-improvement. Each is a genuine moral consideration, but they can override each other. No algorithm determines which wins -- practical wisdom must decide.
- The Role of Intuitions
- If a theoretical conclusion (e.g., "kill one to save five") conflicts with a strong moral intuition (it's wrong to push someone off a bridge), we should sometimes reject the premise rather than accept the monstrous conclusion. "Tollensing the ponens."
- Reflective Equilibrium
- Rawls: we achieve moral understanding by iteratively adjusting our principles to fit our intuitions and our intuitions to fit our principles until they cohere. Neither principles nor intuitions are immune to revision.
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Slide 14
The Problem of Moral Luck
- Thomas Nagel identified a deep puzzle: our moral judgments routinely depend on factors entirely beyond the agent's control -- yet Kantian morality says only the will, which is within our control, has moral worth.
- Types of Moral Luck
- Resultant luck: Two drunk drivers; one hits a child, one doesn't. We judge them differently even though their choices were identical.
- Circumstantial luck: Would you have collaborated with the Nazis if you had been German in 1938?
- Constitutive luck: The character traits that lead you to be courageous or cowardly are themselves products of genes and upbringing you didn't choose.
- Causal luck: If determinism is true, your choices are caused by prior events you didn't choose.
- The Dilemma
- We can't abandon moral luck without giving up most of our actual moral practices. But acknowledging it undermines the Kantian ideal of moral responsibility grounded in free choice. Nagel: "The area of genuine agency, and thus of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point."
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Slide 15
Effective Altruism
- A contemporary movement applying rigorous consequentialism to philanthropy and life choices: how can we do the most good with our limited resources?
- Peter Singer's Challenge
- If you walked past a drowning child, you would save her even at cost to your clothes and shoes. But children die preventable deaths every day for lack of $5 worth of malaria prevention. What is the morally relevant difference? Singer's argument implies radical demands on affluent people's giving.
- EA's Key Commitments
- Impartial concern for all sentient beings, regardless of proximity
- Empirical rigor: which interventions actually work?
- Cost-effectiveness: maximize good per dollar spent
- Cause prioritization: some causes are vastly more tractable than others
- Long-termism: future generations may vastly outnumber present ones
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Slide 16
Animal Ethics
- If what matters morally is the capacity to suffer (sentience), why should it matter whether a being is human? This question, sharpened by Peter Singer, has transformed ethics and law.
- Singer's Argument
- "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" (Bentham). Singer extends the utilitarian calculus to all sentient animals. Factory farming produces enormous suffering and is morally indefensible on utilitarian grounds.
- Tom Regan's Rights View
- Animals have rights not merely because they suffer but because they are "subjects-of-a-life" -- beings with beliefs, desires, memory, and a welfare that matters to them. Rights cannot be traded off against aggregate utility.
- Speciesism
- Unjustified differential treatment of beings based solely on species membership. Like racism and sexism, it privileges an arbitrary characteristic. The challenge: articulate a morally relevant difference between a human infant and a chimpanzee.
- Practical Implications
- Factory farming, animal experimentation, hunting, zoos, pets -- all come under ethical scrutiny. Several countries have extended legal personhood or constitutional protection to certain animals (Spain: great apes; India: cetaceans; Argentina: Sandra the orangutan).
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Slide 17
Environmental Ethics
- Does the natural world have intrinsic value, or only instrumental value for human and animal welfare? Environmental ethics extends moral consideration beyond sentient beings.
- Deep Ecology (Naess)
- Arne Naess argued that nature has intrinsic value independent of human interests. Ecosystems, species, rivers, mountains deserve moral consideration. This requires a biocentric or ecocentric worldview, not merely enlightened anthropocentrism.
- Key Questions
- Do future generations have moral claims on us?
- Do species have rights, or only individual organisms?
- What do we owe ecosystems?
- Is climate change primarily a justice issue (who bears the costs?)?
- How do we weigh the interests of the unborn?
- Environmental ethics is increasingly urgent: our choices today will determine which species exist, which ecosystems survive, and what conditions billions of future humans inherit.
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Slide 18
Applied Ethics: Medical
- Bioethics developed rapidly after mid-20th century controversies over human experimentation, euthanasia, and reproductive technology. Four principles now dominate medical ethics.
- Autonomy
- Patients have the right to make informed decisions about their own care, including the right to refuse treatment. Informed consent is not merely procedural but a deep respect for persons as self-governing agents.
- Beneficence
- The duty to act in the patient's best interests -- not merely to avoid harm but actively to promote wellbeing. This creates a positive obligation, not just a constraint.
- Non-Maleficence
- Primum non nocere -- first, do no harm. The duty to avoid causing harm, even when good outcomes are intended. This underlies debates about euthanasia, experimental treatments, and off-label drug use.
- Justice
- Fair distribution of healthcare resources. Who gets the scarce organ? Who is prioritized in a pandemic? Justice requires not only procedural fairness but attention to structural inequality in health outcomes.
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Slide 19
Applied Ethics: Artificial Intelligence
- AI raises moral questions at a speed that outpaces institutional response. Several are now urgent.
- Algorithmic Justice
- Facial recognition systems with higher error rates on Black faces
- Recidivism algorithms that encode historical bias
- Hiring tools that learn from discriminatory past hires
- Who is responsible when an algorithm harms someone?
- Existential Risk
- Advanced AI systems pursuing misspecified goals
- Autonomous weapons systems: who bears moral responsibility for their actions?
- Mass unemployment displacement: do we owe anything to those displaced?
- Surveillance capitalism: the commodification of human attention and behavior
- "The question is not whether intelligent machines can think, but whether we can maintain meaningful human agency in a world shaped by them."Contemporary AI ethics discourse
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Slide 20
Moral Psychology: How We Actually Reason
- Moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene) uses empirical methods to understand how human moral reasoning actually works -- with surprising and sometimes disturbing implications for traditional moral philosophy.
- Haidt's Social Intuitionist Model
- Moral judgments are primarily intuitive (fast, automatic, emotional). Reasoning is mostly post-hoc rationalization -- we decide with our gut and then construct reasons. The "moral dumbfounding" experiments: people judge actions as wrong but can't explain why.
- Greene's Dual-Process Theory
- Utilitarian judgments emerge from deliberate, effortful cognition (System 2). Deontological judgments emerge from fast, emotional responses (System 1). The footbridge case triggers emotional rejection; pulling the lever does not.
- Moral Foundations Theory
- Haidt: humans have six moral foundations -- Care/Harm, Fairness/Reciprocity, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, Liberty/Oppression. Different cultures and political groups emphasize different foundations.
- Implications
- If moral reasoning is largely post-hoc rationalization, does this debunk moral philosophy? Or does it just show that moral philosophy must engage with how we actually reason, not with an idealized rational agent?
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Slide 21
The Is-Ought Problem
- "In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning... when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not."David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
- Hume's "guillotine": you cannot derive an "ought" from an "is." No set of factual premises logically entails a moral conclusion without a moral premise. This is arguably the most important insight in metaethics.
- G.E. Moore's "naturalistic fallacy" extends this: defining moral terms like "good" in naturalistic terms (pleasure, evolutionary fitness, God's will) commits a logical error. Goodness is a sui generis property, not reducible to natural properties.
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Slide 22
Moral Relativism and Universalism
- Are moral norms universal -- binding on all people regardless of culture -- or are they relative to cultural contexts?
- The Relativist Case
- Enormous cross-cultural variation in moral norms
- No neutral standpoint from which to judge cultures
- Moral "universalism" has often served as cover for imperialism
- Tolerance of difference is itself a value
- The Universalist Response
- Descriptive relativism (norms vary) does not entail metaethical relativism (no norms are true)
- We do make cross-cultural judgments that seem correct: slavery is wrong everywhere
- The relativist must tolerate female genital mutilation, honor killing, and genocide if local norms permit
- Most apparent differences rest on factual disagreements, not value disagreements
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Slide 23
Punishment: Why Punish?
- Criminal punishment involves the deliberate infliction of suffering on human beings. It demands moral justification. Three major theories compete.
- Retributivism
- Punishment is deserved because the criminal has done wrong. The past act creates a present obligation to punish -- regardless of future consequences. Kant: executing a murderer respects their dignity as a rational agent responsible for their choice.
- Deterrence (Consequentialist)
- Punishment is justified by its future effects: deterring the offender (specific) and potential offenders (general). The problem: this seems to justify punishing the innocent if it would deter crime effectively.
- Rehabilitation
- The goal of punishment should be to restore the offender to productive social life. Punishment is only justified to the extent it achieves this. Raises questions about incapacitation: what about those who cannot be rehabilitated?
- Restorative Justice
- Focus on repairing harm done to victims and communities rather than punishing offenders. Involves dialogue, accountability, and community-based responses. Growing evidence of effectiveness in reducing recidivism.
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Slide 24
The Demandingness Objection
- Consequentialism seems to demand too much. If I should always act to maximize utility, I should give away nearly all my income to effective charities, volunteer constantly, and sacrifice almost everything personal. Is this a reductio, or are we just rationalizing?
- The Demanding Conclusion
- Peter Singer: if you can prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, you ought to do it. A wealthy person who spends on luxuries while people die preventable deaths is acting wrongly.
- Responses
- Agent-relative permissions: it is permissible to give some extra weight to your own projects and relationships
- Satisficing consequentialism: you must do "good enough," not the best
- Scheffler's agent-centered prerogatives: each person is permitted to give some weight to their own projects
- Threshold deontology: consequentialist reasoning kicks in only for very large stakes
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Slide 25
Derek Parfit and the Deep Problems
- Derek Parfit (1942-2017) devoted his career to what he called "the most important and difficult questions in moral philosophy." His Reasons and Persons (1984) transformed the field.
- The Non-Identity Problem
- Future people who will exist only if we act badly cannot be harmed by our bad actions -- because if we acted well, they would not exist. How can we wrong someone whose existence depends on the wrong? Parfit showed this threatens all future-oriented ethics.
- The Repugnant Conclusion
- Classic utilitarianism implies that a world with billions of miserable but barely-worth-living lives might be better than a world with fewer very happy people, if the total is higher. Virtually everyone finds this repugnant -- but rejecting it proves surprisingly difficult.
- Personal Identity
- If our identity is not what matters -- if psychological connectedness is all that survives, and there is no deep further fact of personal identity -- then much of our self-concern and certain moral claims about punishment, promises, and desert need radical revision.
- Convergence
- In On What Matters (2011), Parfit argued that consequentialism, Kantianism, and contractualism converge on the same answers at the deepest level. Different routes to the same summit -- a profound optimism about the unity of moral truth.
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Slide 26
Justice and Global Ethics
- Contemporary global ethics asks whether our moral obligations stop at national borders -- and if not, what radical demands this places on affluent nations and individuals.
- Cosmopolitan Justice
- Peter Singer, Thomas Pogge: the arbitrary fact of birth in a wealthy country rather than a poor one confers enormous advantages. Global inequality is not a natural fact but the product of institutional arrangements that affluent nations sustain. We have positive duties to rectify global poverty.
- The Nationalist Response
- David Miller, Michael Walzer: special obligations to co-nationals are legitimate -- as legitimate as special obligations to family. The nation is a genuine moral community. We cannot simply universalize away these particularist attachments. But we do have some duties to non-citizens.
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Slide 27
Virtue Ethics Revival: Contemporary Forms
- G.E.M. Anscombe's 1958 paper "Modern Moral Philosophy" sparked a revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the sterile consequentialism-deontology debate.
- Philippa Foot
- Natural goodness: virtues are objective features of human flourishing rooted in our nature as a biological and social species. Like a good wolf or a good plant, a good human is one that exemplifies the natural virtues of its kind.
- Alasdair MacIntyre
- After Virtue (1981): modern moral philosophy has lost the teleological framework that made virtue intelligible. Without a conception of human telos (purpose), virtues become arbitrary preferences. We need to recover tradition-embedded practices.
- Martha Nussbaum
- Capabilities approach: the goal of justice is to enable all people to exercise a threshold level of central human capabilities -- life, health, emotion, reason, affiliation, play, control over environment. A form of Aristotelian politics.
- Moral Exemplars
- Rather than deriving rules and then following them, virtue ethics proposes identifying moral exemplars -- people who embody the virtues -- and asking "what would this person do?" A more realistic account of how moral learning actually works.
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Slide 28
Major Ethical Theories Compared
- TheoryCentral QuestionKey ThinkersKey Weakness
- Virtue EthicsWhat kind of person should I be?Aristotle, Aquinas, FootVague action guidance
- UtilitarianismWhat maximizes well-being?Bentham, Mill, SingerToo demanding; ignores rights
- KantianismWhat can I universalize?Kant, KorsgaardRigid; ignores consequences
- ContractualismWhat could no one reasonably reject?Rawls, ScanlonWho counts? Future persons?
- Care EthicsWhat do my relationships require?Gilligan, NoddingsHard to generalize; partialistic
- Natural LawWhat accords with human nature?Aquinas, FinnisWhich nature? Contested
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Slide 29
The Future of Ethics
- Several developments are transforming the landscape of moral philosophy in the 21st century.
- Population Ethics
- How do we compare outcomes with different numbers of people? The non-identity problem and the repugnant conclusion are unsolved. With climate change and AI affecting future populations, these are not merely theoretical.
- Moral Enhancement
- Should we use drugs, genetic engineering, or brain stimulation to make people more moral -- more empathic, less aggressive, more cooperative? What are the implications for moral responsibility and authenticity?
- AI and Moral Status
- If AI systems become conscious, sentient, or have preferences, do they acquire moral status? How would we know? The question of machine consciousness may be the most important ethics question of the next century.
- Global Coordination
- Climate change, pandemic preparedness, and nuclear risk require global ethical frameworks and institutions. The political philosophy of global governance is the applied ethics challenge of our time.
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Slide 30
Ethics as Practice
- "The unexamined life is not worth living."Socrates, Apology
- Ethics is not a spectator sport. The goal of moral philosophy is not merely to understand ethics but to be better -- to make choices that are more deliberate, more considered, more consistent with what we actually value.
- The Four Questions
- Before any significant choice: (1) What are all the consequences? (2) Would I be comfortable if everyone acted this way? (3) What would a person of good character do? (4) What could I justify to those affected?
- Moral Imagination
- The capacity to see how things look from other perspectives -- to imagine the experience of those affected by our choices who are not present in our immediate decision-making environment.
- The Long Game
- Character is built through choices. Aristotle: we become what we repeatedly do. Each small ethical choice is practice for larger ones. The examined life is not necessarily the easier one -- but it is the one worth living.
- Virtue is habitReason mattersOthers matter
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