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469 BCE
Socrates (469-399 BCE)
One of his paradoxes is whether weakness of will – doing wrong when you genuinely knew what was right – exists. He seemed to think thet people only did wrong when at the moment the perceived benefits seemed to outweigh the costs. The development of personal ethics is mastering what he called “the art of measurement," correcting the distortions that skew one’s analyses of benefit and cost. According to him “no one commits an evil act knowingly and doing wrong arises out of ignorance.” -
428 BCE
Plato (428-347 BCE)
Plato maintains a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics. That is to say, happiness or well-being is the highest aim of moral thought and conduct, and the virtues are the requisite skills and dispositions needed to attain it. Plato devoted his whole life to one goal: helping people reach a state called Eudaimonia (fulfillment). To achieve this state, Plato encouraged everyone to think more, taking more time to think logically about our lives and how to lead them efficiently. -
384 BCE
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
Aristotle emphasizes the role of habit in conduct. It is commonly thought that virtues, according to Aristotle, are habits and that the good life is a life of mindless. Virtue, therefore, manifests itself in action. More explicitly, an action counts as virtuous, according to Aristotle, when one holds oneself in a stable equilibrium of the soul, in order to choose the action knowingly and for its own sake. This stable equilibrium of the soul is what constitutes character. -
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Thomas Hobbes main grounding in philosophy was on the basis of materialism, believing that everything that happens is a result of the physical world and that the soul does not exist. Hobbes' contention was that the concept of good and evil are related to human desire and aversion. What an individual desires he percieves to be good and what that individual harbors an aversion to must be bad. This philosophy of values is due to an attitude of self preservation and protection. -
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
Jeremy Bentham is primarily known today for his moral philosophy, especially his principle of utilitarianism, which evaluates actions based upon their consequences. Overall happiness created for everyone affected by the action. He held a hedonistic account of both motivation and value according to which what is fundamentally valuable and what ultimately motivates us is pleasure and pain. Happiness, according to Bentham, is thus a matter of experiencing pleasure and lack of pain.
