Introducing Ethics

Introducing Ethics guides us through the history of Western ethics, starting with Socrates’s effort to use reason for questions about what it means to be a good person and what we should do. We then explore three major moral theories—John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, Immanuel Kant’s deontology, and Aristotle’s character ethics—as if they were a large-scale Socratic dialogue, where each raises objections and builds on the others. We conclude with two twentieth-century challenges to Socrates’s approach: Carol Gilligan’s feminism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism.