Christopher Panza

I will freely admit that I am the type of person whose eyes gloss over when philosophical discussions start getting technical. I also tend to quickly get bored by what I often see as semantic quibbles. Thus, Ethics for Dummies has two things going for it, for a reader like me. It's an engaging read, and it focuses on ethics, the most practical branch of philosophy.

The bulk of this book is devoted to an overview of different ethical theories. I cannot vouch for the correctness since, as mentioned above, my eyes tend to glaze over at most presentations of ethics, but the book did provide a thorough, if rudimentary, introduction to major categories of ethical theories including: virtue ethics, utilitarian ethics, ethics of principle (primarily Kant's categorical imperative), social contract theories of ethics, golden rule / common sense ethics, and feminist care ethics. These descriptions were quite useful, and encouraged me to think more deeply about the basis of my personal system of ethics.

The final part of the book, the ethical case studies, was vaguely interesting, but fairly shallow for anyone who has thought about any of the cases brought up in more than passing detail. What I would love to have seen -- although I freely admit it would have prevented their ability to cover so much ground -- is looking at each issue through the lens of each of the major ethical theories presented in the book.

I am quite happy I read this book, and will likely read it again eventually to solidify the ideas I gleaned from it.… (mehr)