Review of "An introduction to Kant's ethics" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I picked up this book after watching a TED talk in which the speaker raised some excellent questions about how we can responsibly manage new technology without a moral framework - www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/damon_horowitz.html As he pointed out, it's dismaying that more people have a strong opinion on their mobile phone operating system than on what is morally right and wrong and how to even determine that. This book is a good overview of Kant's opinions on ethics. It's definitely not a quick or easy read, despite the fairly short length. What Kant does provide is a way to objectively decide whether something is morally right or not, based solely on rational reasoning. Since most debates of right or wrong nowadays just seem to come down to religious or political bickering, we could desperately use some tools like Kant's guidelines to give us some objective yardsticks to measure with. I wish this …
I picked up this book after watching a TED talk in which the speaker raised some excellent questions about how we can responsibly manage new technology without a moral framework - www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/damon_horowitz.html As he pointed out, it's dismaying that more people have a strong opinion on their mobile phone operating system than on what is morally right and wrong and how to even determine that. This book is a good overview of Kant's opinions on ethics. It's definitely not a quick or easy read, despite the fairly short length. What Kant does provide is a way to objectively decide whether something is morally right or not, based solely on rational reasoning. Since most debates of right or wrong nowadays just seem to come down to religious or political bickering, we could desperately use some tools like Kant's guidelines to give us some objective yardsticks to measure with. I wish this kind of thing were taught more consistently in schools.