Stephen’s Reviews > Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics > Status Update

The previous and current sections (on moral character and on moral education, respectively) seem to present a right-leaning or conservative bias. I wonder if it's this way for the same reason a book of sociology readings would seem left-leaning, i.e., because that's pretty much all that's available, and not necessarily because "reality has a bias."

Kant: "Animals, not being free, live according to rules. But free beings [e.g., humans] can only act regularly, if they restrict their freedom by rules." I wonder what Kant would say about "chaotic" or "fractal" structures that emerge from the iteration of apparently simple rules...

This section on "Morality and Self-interest" is pretty thin. Colin McGinn's "Why Not Be a Bad Person?" is just... He's a philosopher! But it's all pat statements or flowery images to emote a point. Virtue is reflected in people's faces? Reliably? Errrrr...

It really seems like the kind of thing a person writes so they can get frustrated at people about later.

Ayn Rand DESTROYS altruist strawmen with FACTS and LOGIC and a cringeworthy citation of her own fiction novel! (This is from the intro to THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, which I read and reviewed already.) Buried in the self-righteous bloviation is a good point that evil lies not in the fact that one pursues one's own interests, but in *what* one regards as to one's own interest. But that's pretty much it.

In "Egoism and Moral Skepticism" James Rachels makes a nice and careful case against ethical egoism (one *ought* to do only that which is in one's greatest self-interest) but IMO makes a careless case against psychological egoism (every voluntary action is, at bottom, based on the actor's self-interest). Not that the theory as stated seems problem-free, but..

"The Unselfishness Trap" reads like warmed-over Objectivism. How realistic is a call to put others first at the *expense* of one's own benefit? Is it impossible, or even uncommon, for "donating to your local self" to become an exercise in excess? Is there no potential vice there?

"There are men who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice, and who believe themselves mild and moderate, charitable and faithful, because they have exerted their eloquence in commendation of mildness, fidelity, and other virtues." Whew, I don't know how much I would agree with Samuel Johnson overall, but this is a doozy. Good that he never saw the Internet!

An excerpt from Augustine's "Confessions," which, I get what he was getting at, but I don't think the tone agrees with me (reading from the outside, so to speak). Cf. Dante's PURGATORIO for a different (IMO) exploration of the theme.

Now on to the famous Calvinist tract "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which, oh boy

The section on virtue was pretty good, now to the section on vice.

Virtue ethics is pretty cool.