Haven't ride in a while, but a long flight means prime reading opportunity. Forgot which book led me to discovering this book, but it is a humorous and light-hearted read on ethics. Some new concepts that I like are:
Technically, in the original Greek, Aristotle actually uses the nebulous word "eudaimonia," which sometimes gets translated as "happiness" and sometimes as "flourishing.
In her masterwork, Ordinary Vices, she makes a compelling argument that cruelty not pride or envy or wrath or any of the other classic "deadly sins" is actually the worst human vice, and should be placed atop the list of things to avoid. "To put cruelty first," she writes: is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by revealed religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God. However, cruelty -the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear-is a wrong done entirely to another creature.
Williams uses the word integrity to attack the utilitarians less in the sense of "honesty and moral uprightness" than "wholeness," Or "undividedness." He says that their worldview causes a crack in the basic foundation of an individual's being the sense that "each of us is specially responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do." Ten people might die because Sheriff Pete thinks mass murder is a good way to maintain law and order-but that's on Pete. If Jim kills a guy, that's on Jim, even if he does it for the sake of some kind of "greater good." Jim's integrity has to matter, at some level his sense of being a holistic entity who's not required to compromise himself by acting in a way that divides him into parts, some of which he won't recognize as his own. Jim has to think it's permissible for him-not just for "someone" -to shoot an innocent person if it saves nine others.
