Paul Tuns, Review:
Ethics for Beginners: Big Ideas from 32 Great Minds by Peter Kreeft (Word on Fire, $32.50 pb, 260 pages)
Peter Kreeft may be the best living explainer of philosophy and in his most recent book he examines what some of the greatest minds in history had to say about ethics. Ethics for Beginners is a book for “intelligent beginners” who want to better understand “the big ‘existential’ questions, not the little ‘analytical ones.’” It is at once a test book about foundational questions about ethics – both the summum bonum (greatest good) and individual ethics, the questions about the “meaning of life” and “what kind of person should I be” – but “not just a usual textbook.” It is meant as a do-it-yourself manual on ethics but in one of his nine introductions, Kreeft discusses ways in which teachers could incorporate the book into their instruction. Ethics for Beginners is “historical rather than systematic” but “it’s not about the history of ethics, it’s about ethics.” And ethics matter, Kreeft argues because it has a relation “to everything else” from religion and science to law, politics, and art.
Each of the 32 chapters focuses on one “big idea” each from the “great minds” from the history of philosophy and they typically are just three to four pages with seven parts: the question the idea answers, the answer or point, the explanation of the idea, the arguments for it, the presuppositions behind it, the logical corollaries or consequences “in both thought and in life,” and the objections to the idea. Nearly every chapter concludes with a list of further reading.
Kreeft, a Catholic philosopher, begins with “Four Teachers from the East,” starting with Hinduism and its “psychology based on the ‘four wants of man’.” This psychology culminates in liberating ourselves from the lesser desires. This is followed by Buddha and his teaching on Nirvana, a “kind of simplified Hinduism,” Confucious and the attainment of harmony, and finally Lao Tzu and “nature as a teacher.”
Kreeft then moves west to Moses and the Divine Law (Judaism), the moral foundation of the West, followed by Jesus’s example of agape love (“the unselfish willing of the other person’s good),” and finally Muhammad and surrender to the will of God.
Having covered seven of the world’s major religions, Kreeft settles in for long discussions of ethics as presented by the giants of Greek philosophy—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates taught (mostly through the writings of Plato) “the key to moral virtue, and therefore to happiness, is wisdom.” By cultivating wisdom, we cultivate goodness. Plato “systematized” Socrates, that is he applied Socrates’s principles to politics. Through his Theory of Forms, Plato argued for the “objective reality of moral values.” Aristotle offered the “ethics of common sense,” modifying Plato’s theories. One example is that Plato thought reason was necessary and sufficient to understand ethics while Aristotle thought reason was necessary but insufficient, that it needed to be leavened by good habits and cultivated by practice and repetition. He was insistent that man had the capacity for both virtue and evil.
Kreeft next turns his attention to the Sophists, Stoics, and Epicureans, each offering a basic idea of how to live that is “easy to live because they are not complex, complete, and comprehensive, but simple, specialized, and (to speak frankly) somewhat shallow. Sophism is moral relativism, Epicureanism is hedonism, and Stoicism is detachment.
From there we move to the Middle Ages and “Three Christian Saints” – Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. Kreeft summarizes the deep and rich thought of Augustine as “the heart and its loves are not to be suppressed but perfected, for the heart is the central thing” – and it ought to be directed to Heaven (the City of God), not earthbound (the City of Man). For Anselm, God was the “one necessary good.” Kreeft goes into some depth about how Aquinas married Aristotelean and Christian ethics. Kreeft notes that Aquinas answered “what is the greatest good” with a list, in ascending order: “wealth, honour, fame or glory, power, bodily goods (health), pleasure, goods of the soul (wisdom and virtue), and God.”
The shift from ancient and medieval ethics on the one hand and modern ethics on the other is stark. The “old politics” says Kreeft, “was simply social ethics” with no differentiating “standard(s) for individual and social justice,” whereas modern politics is “’the politics of the possible,’ not of the ideal.” Thus Kreeft explores Machiavelli’s “separation between ethics and politics,” Hobbes’s “power as the good,” and Rousseau’s “feeling as the good.” It was the beginning of the (false) separation of reason and religion, and according to Kreeft this was not progress although it has remained influential to this day. There was then a return to “classic modern ethical alternatives” with David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill. Hume offered “emotivist” ethics (based on feelings) and Kant taught “a non-metaphysical moral absolutism.” The chapter on Kant is one of the longest and most technical or densest chapters, but it is required, with Kreeft explaining that Kant alongside Aristotle “are the two most influential ethical philosophers of all time.” Yet, Kant “leaves no room for moral habits” or emotions, instincts, or heroism. Mill’s utilitarianism, Kreeft asserts, “is probably the most influential ethical philosophy in contemporary America,” with its goal of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people and thus the “end justifies the means.”
In the final 40 pages before the appendices, Kreeft explores the ideas of the Existentialists (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre), Personalists (Gabriel Marcel and Dietrich von Hildebrand), Analytic Philosophers (A.J. Ayer, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein), before concluding with Alasdair MacIntyre, the sole living philosopher Kreeft examines.
There are about 40 pages of appendices offering advice on how to further think about ethics, beginning with “200 Questions” and proceeding to methods for writing papers and how to have a Socratic debate.
I consider myself more than a beginner when it comes to philosophy but it has been a while since I engaged seriously with the ideas of the greatest minds on the fundamental topics of what is the meaning of life, what is the greatest good, and how should I live my life (virtuously). Kreeft’s Ethics for Beginners is perhaps too modest in its title and goal. This book, like right reason and ethics themselves, is for everyone.
