In The Thinker’s Guide to Ethical Reasoning, Richard Paul and Linda Elder present the vital role of ethics in the creation and ultimate success of cooperative societies. Independent of religious or cultural norms, ethical concepts promote sustainable advancement and offer a framework by which all people can not only coexist but prosper.
Exploring the nature of ethical reasoning, the guide reveals the most common ways ethical reasoning becomes flawed and teaches readers how to avoid these flaws. It lays out the function of ethics and its main impediments, the social counterfeits of ethics, the elements of ethical reasoning, important ethical abilities and traits, a vocabulary of ethics, and intellectual standards essential to assessing ethical reasoning.
As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book advances the mission of the Foundation for Critical Thinking to promote fairminded critical societies through cultivating essential intellectual abilities and virtues across every field of study across world.
They are very confused on religion, psychology, law, language, and rights. This is what you get when you refuse to read any classic works and interpret the world and history from a postmodern lens. The ethics put forward have no grounding, and only work because of the remains of real morality derived from belief in God.
Interesting and I enjoyed Paul's clear, direct writing style. Many of the other ethics books I've had to read this semester were muddled and unclear or wrote as if they had to make no argument because what they were writing about was "obvious."
This guide was a quick and easy read on ethical reasoning. It was very clear, understandable, and presented a lot of important information in a tangible way. I’d recommend this guide to anyone wanting to deepen their understanding of ethics.
I haven't fully processed this little volume, but I did find it to be very clear and effective at showing how and why ethical thought should be kept separate from religious, cultural, and even legal norms. The list of english-language terms that are regularly used to identify positive and negative ethical actions is also a useful tool.
[correction: I initially said ethical thought should not be kept separate...that was just a error from trying to frame my thought while writing. Sorry about that...]