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Mankind has always wondered: What makes a life good? How should I decide what to do? Though humanity has been pondering such questions for thousands of years, we are seemingly no closer to having THE answer than we were when Plato initially contemplated such things in his dialogues. In spite of their seemingly indeterminability, such questions remain at the center of philosophical inquiry throughout the history of Western thought. Nearly every philosopher of note had something to say about the topic. So, what I have attempted to provide here is a short list of the most influential books in Ethics from ancient Greece to the modern West. The list is by no means comprehensive, but is meant to provide one or two seminal figures from various periods. These figures were chosen in direct correlation to their continued influence on ethical discourse.
The list begins, of course, with Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s <i>Republic </i> and Aristotle’s <i>Nichomachean Ethics</i> have truly stood the test of time, remaining the seminal hallmarks of Western ethics. The dialogue in the <i>Republic</i> is in regards to justice and ultimately seeks to explore why one should want to be just. The <i>Nichomachean Ethics</i> provides a systematic approach to answering what the ethical life consists in, beginning with a teleological discussion of happiness, or <i>eudaimonia</i>, and continuing with a consideration of the moral and intellectual virtues. All ethical thought post Plato and Aristotle is in many ways indebted to these two thinkers. I also included the Latin Stoic, Seneca, as his ethical thought and framework was particularly influential in early Christian ethics and scholastic theology going into the medieval period. Stoic ethics is famously marked by 1) an aversion to strong emotion which, ultimately, is linked to bad action and 2) a surrender of control over those things which are out of our control. It reads more or less like a modern self-help tutorial.
As a medieval philosopher, I am tempted to include several more thinkers from that period; however, Aquinas is fairly representative of ethics during that era. Of course, there are several competing factions and ethical systems during the middle ages, particularly the high middle ages, but because Aquinas’s philosophy became particularly favored in the Catholic Church, it had a lasting influence that many of Aquinas’s contemporaries did not enjoy. One of Aquinas’ major contributions to the field of ethics was synthesizing Aristotle and Christianity in an impressively systematic way. However, what I have chosen to include here is Aquinas’s Treatise on Law in a translation that also includes some other excerpts from the <i>Summa Theologiae</i> wherein he discusses the role of conscience and synderesis (distinctly Christian ethical developments) and most famously: the natural law. Though Aquinas did not create natural law theory, he certainly gives it the most detailed and coherent treatment.
# Immanuel Kant, <i>Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals</i>, trans. Mary Gregor. (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
# Nietzsche, Friedrich <i>Beyond Good and Evil</i>, trans. Walter Kaufman. (Vintage, 1989).
# Anscombe, G.E.M., “Modern Moral Philosophy” reprinted in <i>Human Life, Action, and Ethics</i>, ed. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally. (Imprint Academic, 2005).
# Rawls, John, <i>A Theory of Justice</i>. (Harvard University Press, 1972).
# McIntyre, Alasdiar, <i>After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory</i>, Second Edition. (Notre Dame University Press, 1984).
