M. Ashraf's Reviews > Ethics: A Very Short Introduction

Ethics
A Very Short Introduction #80
Simon Blackburn

I think it is not an into to Ethics but rather a discussion through some of the ethical and moral questions we may face in our life without getting that deeper into philosophy and without being impartial about some topics.
I find it to be a good book though. I enjoyed reading it.

Human beings are ethical animals. I do not mean that we naturally behave particularly well, nor that we are endlessly telling each other what to do. But we grade and evaluate, and compare and admire, and claim and justify. We do not just ‘prefer’ this or that, in isolation. We prefer that our preferences are shared; we turn them into demands on each other. Events endlessly adjust our sense of responsibility, our guilt and shame, and our sense of our own worth and that of others. We hope for lives whose story leaves us looking admirable; we like our weaknesses to be hidden and deniable. Drama, literature, and poetry all work out ideas of standards of behavior and their consequences.

For many people, ethics is not only tied up with religion but is completely settled by it. Such people do not need to think too much about ethics, because there is an authoritative code of instructions,
a handbook of how to live. It is the word of Heaven or the will of a Being greater than ourselves.

religion is not the foundation of ethics, but its showcase or its symbolic expression.
we drape our own standards with the stories of divine origin as a way of asserting their authority. We do not just have a standard of conduct that forbids, say, murder, but we have mythological historical examples in which God expressed his displeasure at cases of murder.

There are only the different truths of different communities. This is the idea of relativism.

What is just or right in the eyes of one person may not be so in the eyes of another, and neither side can claim real truth, unique truth, for its particular rules.

If we are good, it may be because we were never tempted enough, or frightened enough, or put in
desperate enough need.