Ethics

• There is no reason to do anything unless there is something worth caring about.
• A person who needs help and hope is not easily persuaded by reasons for doing anything.
• The amoralist questions why there is anything that one ought to do.
• The amoralist is a real challenge to moral reasoning.
• The amoralist is indifferent to moral considerations.
• The amoralist lacks moral sensibility.
• The amoralist is a parasite in the moral system, with a peculiar morality.
• The amoralist regards moral education merely as social conditioning.
• Moral education for the amoralist is about making people want to act in an unselfish way.
• The amoralist only acts for others depending on how he feels.
• The amoralist is short of fairness.
• The amoralist is a model where we may glimpse what morality needs in order to get off the ground.
• A stereotype from a gangster movie might come to mind, of the ruthless and rather glamorous figure who cares about his mother, his child, even his mistress.
• Plato was a student of Socrates who founded the Academy, considered to be the first university in the West.
• Invisibility can be a powerful tool for injustice.
• Plato stressed the importance of science and mathematics, resulting in him being known as the “maker of mathematics”.
• Injustice is more profitable than justice.
• Humans are only acting justly when it is necessary.
• The Ring of Gyges is the only impediment for the just to be unjust.
• The Republic is Plato’s most famous work, detailing a wise, ideal society run by a philosopher (or philosopher-king).
• Plato was also a wrestler, competing in the “Isthmian Games”, an athletic event similar to the Greek Olympics.
• The Greek historian Diogenes Laertius writes that Plato’s birth name was Aristocles, after his grandfather, which was his wrestling nickname meaning ‘broad’ (platon) —referring to either his shoulders or forehead.
• Plato believed that a lifelong devotion to physical exercise, to the exclusion of anything else, produced a certain type of mind, while neglect of it produced another.
• In The Republic, Plato stated that “Excessive emphasis on athletics produces an excessively uncivilized type, while a purely literary training leaves men indecently soft.”
• The Ring of Gyges is a story from Plato’s work The Republic, detailing a situation where a ring grants its wearer invisibility.
• Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics is based on the concept of eudaimonia, which is self-sufficient, makes a life choiceworthy, and is chosen for itself.
• Eudaimonia is the end of what is doable in action.
• Virtue, according to Aristotle, is twofold: of thought and of character.
• The virtue of thought both comes about and grows mostly as a result of teaching, which is why it requires experience and time.
• The virtue of character, or êthikê, results from habit.
• Virtue is concerned with feelings and actions in which excess is in error and subject to blame, as is deficiency, whereas the mean is subject to praise and is on the correct path (and both these features are characteristic of virtue).
• Virtues can be ruined by excess and deficiency, but can be preserved by the medial condition (mean).
• Being excellent requires hard work.
• Virtues of character do not come about in us naturally, but are acquired through engaging in activities such as building houses and playing the lyre.
• Human reason and habituation are key tenets of pursuing what is virtuous.
• For Aristotle, eudaimonia is the ultimate goal of humans.
• Virtue is the state concerned with pleasure and pain that does best actions, and vice is the contrary state.
• Excess and deficiency are of vice.
• A virtuous character is cultivated through habits.
• Courage is the medial condition between rashness and cowardice.