Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics

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This is not your typical ethics book: its sleek physical dimensions mirror Simon Blackburn's intelligent but unencumbered treatment of the main threats and origins of ethics. In Being Good, Blackburn addresses the fear that "ethical claims are a kind of sham" before sketching a road map of the history of ethics, its practical consequences, and its ultimate foundations. All this is an ambitious task for such a diminutive volume.

A professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, Blackburn is one of the giants of contemporary moral theory and a trustworthy guide through its labyrinth. He prefers parsimony to complexity--helpful for readers with only a casual acquaintance with philosophy--yet he manages to avoid trivializing his subject matter. Moreover, Being Good is wonderfully enlivened by illustrations by Paul Klee, William Blake, Eugène Delacroix, Francisco de Goya, and even Vietnam War photography and cartoons. Blackburn concludes on a promising note: "If we are careful, and mature, and imaginative, and fair, and nice, and lucky, the moral mirror in which we gaze at ourselves may not show us saints. But it need not show us monsters, either." --Eric de Place


From Publishers Weekly
When faced with an ethical dilemma, should we seek solutions that offer the greatest good or happiness to the greatest number of people? Are there any universal laws or principles by which ethical conduct should be governed? From what sources are ethical principles derived? Cambridge philosopher Blackburn addresses these and other questions in this straightforward introduction to ethics, a companion to his Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy. In part one, he considers seven subjects religion, relativism, evolutionary theory, egoism, determinism, unreasonable demands and false consciousness "that seem to suggest that ethics is somehow impossible." For example, relativism (the idea there is no one truth but different truths), he argues, often ends in nihilism, or the notion that there are indeed no values and no truth. Next, Blackburn discusses several ethical theories, including deontology (the theory that our ethical actions must be governed by rules) and utilitarianism (the theory that our ethical actions must be governed by their consequences), as well as rights theories and Kant's categorical imperative, which elevates duty to universal law. In a final section, Blackburn suggests that neither Kant, rights theories, deontology or utilitarianism provide adequate grounds for being good. Rather, he argues, "ethical principles are those that would be agreed in any reasonable cooperative procedure for coming to one mind about our conduct." Unfortunately, Blackburn never develops his idea about a common point of view for judging our conduct (he doesn't explain, for instance, how such a cooperative transaction can take place when partners in the conversation are using different ethical languages), and that is where this little book, which is so rich in analysis, falters significantly. Illus. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
Writing with wit and elegance, Simon Blackburn tackles the basic questions of ethics in this lively book, highlighting the complications and troubling issues that spring from the very simple question of how we ought to live. Blackburn dissects the many common reasons for why we are skeptical about ethics. Drawing on examples from history, politics, religion and everyday personal experience, he shows how cynicism and self-consciousness can paralyze us into considering ethics a hopeless pursuit. He assures us that ethics is neither futile nor irrelevant, but an intimate part of the most important issues of living--of birth, death, happiness, desire, freedom, pleasure, and justice. Indeed, from moral dilemmas about abortion and euthanasia, to our obsession with personal rights, to our longing for a sense of meaning in life, our everyday struggles are rife with ethical issues. Blackburn distills the arguments of Hume, Kant and Aristotle down to their essences, to underscore the timeless relevance of our voice of conscience, the pitfalls of complacency, and our concerns about truth, knowledge and human progress. Blackburn's rare combination of depth, rigor, and sparkling prose, along with his distinguished ranking among contemporary philosophers, mark Being Good as an important statement on our current disenchantment with ethics. It challenges us to take a more thoughtful reading of our ethical climate and to ponder more carefully our own standards of behavior.


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A slender but rich meditation on why humans should choose to behave well when the possibilities for doing evil are so abundant. A follow-up to Blackburn's surprisingly popular Think (1999), this takes a closer look at the thorny subject of ethics, a timely matter in an age of scandal and gossip—even if most of us tend to be forgiving of, say, extramarital assignations and the white lies of daily life. Blackburn suggests that our tolerance befits the modern zeitgeist, a climate in which "we care more about our rights than about our ￯﾿ﾽgood'," the logical culmination of the "me decade" and the culture's insistence on relativism, political correctness, false consciousness, and other enemies of any system of shared ethical behavior. Without falling into tongue-clucking, and careful to distinguish ethics from morals, the author points the way to doing more than merely living "benevolent, admired lives" in benighted times; he urges readers to give close thought to matters of the public and private good and mull over terms such as "freedom" and "responsibility." Here, he offers us a handy guide to doing just that. His lively narrative examines what he considers to be the principal threats to ethical behavior, key ideas such as "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" and "freedom from the bad," and the foundations for a modern theory of ethics. Those foundations rest heavily on a much-admired model, the writings of Immanuel Kant, who believed that "necessity of the categorical imperative was easily visible to any reasoning creature." Blackburn's glosses lend a down-to-earth, commonsensical quality to Kant's rarified arguments, which he augments with other theories of right and wrong.Demanding but highly accessible, and highly rewarding.


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