Thinker's Guide to Understanding the Foundations of Ethical Reasoning

This guide provides insights into the nature of ethical reasoning, why it is so often flawed, and how to avoid those flaws. It lays out: the function of ethics, its main impediments, the social counterfeits of ethics, the elements of ethical reasoning, important ethical abilities and traits, the vocabulary of ethics, and the intellectual standards essential to the assessment of ethical reasoning.

The ultimate basis for ethics is clear: Human behavior has consequences for the welfare of others. We are capable of acting toward others in such a way as to increase or decrease the quality of their lives. We are capable of helping or harming. What is more, we are theoretically capable of understanding when we are doing the one and when the other. This is so because we have the capacity to put ourselves imaginatively in the place of others and recognize how we would be affected if someone were to act toward us as we are acting toward others.
But humans are not automatically skilled ethical reasoners. We need to cultivate our ethical reasoning capacities through disciplined thought and foundational ethical understandings. This guide introduces and discusses these understandings.