Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics

Great anthology of philosophical writing. Sometimes boring, but it's a textbook.

Textbook, No Comment.

all my favorite people in one book!

This is a text book compendium on vice and virtue, written by philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Instead of the moral judgment on behavior, this book asks the question of habituated characters in human beings: what is virtue, why be virtuous, how is human happiness and fulfillment linked with virtue (being beneficial or counter-beneficial). There are many essays irritating and even infuriating to some readers, but there are enough fascinating questions asked and expounded by the writers. One caveat, this book should be guided by a moral theory, as it contains many sharply conflicting point of views.

This was the textbook for my ethics class as an undergraduate. Dr. White taught the course. This was the only course I had with him in my career. As I recall, this was the only class I had on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so as soon as the class was over on Thursday (~10 a.m.), I took off for the weekend.

Anyhow, we delved into many of the controversial issues of the day. I recall the class being much better than I expected.

Used/read as a textbook, this is one of the best, most thoughtful and thought-provoking published works I've ever encountered on the practicalities of moral choices and a moral life.

I had to read this for my last class, and it was actually really good. It's just a collection of essays.

This is a textbook reader of various positions across the realm of (Western) moral philosophy. You've got utilitarianism, you've got deontology, you've got virtue ethics, you've got divine command theory. You've got meta-ethics, you've got applied ethics. It's a wide spectrum.

And yet, it's a mixed bag.

Some of this might be due to the publication date of my particular copy. The most recent material within is from the 1990s, and there's a certain flavor of the times there. A few articles talk about the merits or poverty of education reform, as the Reagan moralizing gave way to the Clinton technocracy. A few articles talk about the surge of academic feminism and its "critique" of everything. Some more articles talk about "lifeboat ethics" and famine relief, as well as animal rights and environmentalism.

The *political* slant is interesting. Most of the philosophy on display is rather, if not "neutral," at least bland to the flavors of contemporary politics, or else so historical to pass beyond that realm. What's left, though, is an amusing and (IMO) pathetic array of mostly American conservative pundits - and although I would not be so elitist to say that only academic philosophers are true philosophers, most of this subset of writers are at best "cultural commentators." And their writing is among the book's weakest, to the point of some weird self-owns, as when Charlie Sykes in "The Values Wasteland" attacks "The Values-Clarification Approach" (an excerpt from which is the preceding chapter of this book!) but the quotes he holds up to punch down appear to not exist in the excerpt, when they either should, or the excerpt is missing editorial ellipses! When the conservative view comes through, the sense I get is one of standing athwart history yelling "stop," or grumblingly huffing about "tough truths" and tradition and "that's just the way things are," when in moral philosophy things are nowhere near that clear.

The best overall sections, I think, were 1 ("Good and Evil), 2 ("Moral Doctrines and Moral Theories"), 5 ("Vice"), and 7 ("Character, Dignity, and Self-Respect"). The section on Virtue was a bit dry (ironic for being one part of the title!) and is decent enough justification for taking the virtue approach to ethics, whereas "Character, Dignity, and Self-Respect" is really good motivation for the same. Not all the chapters are agreeable, but many nonetheless have value - "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" is one such; it's well written and absolutely morally disgusting from my perspective. Note though that many, many contemporary (!) Christians hold to that view at least in part. See more clearly the vast moral-intuitive gulf there.

Would I recommend this book? It's tough to say. If you like philosophy, especially moral philosophy, it has good merit for its grab-bag approach, and you will indeed see all sorts of views and literary genres represented there. The implicit thesis, that moral philosophy is in lots of things and not just philosophical essays, is well defended by the selection. On the other hand, I don't know quite how well the collection represents the balance of the field, especially this Nineties edition vis-a-vis $CURRENT_YEAR. Maybe I should say that I don't know what balance Sommers & Sommers intended to represent - in more than a few sections I got the sense that they had a particular windmill to tilt at.

So, a tough 3 stars. But who said moral philosophy was easy? ;)