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469 BCE
Socrates
"The unexamined life is not worth living". Socrates insisted on a right to think for ourselves. To often, he warned, humans sleep walk through life simply going along the crowd. Socrates then introduces the Socratic method of a way of thinking that allows individuals to define their own purpose through open-minded questioning of what they would hold to be true. -
428 BCE
Plato
Student of Socrates and a teacher to Aristotle. Plato introduced the idea that mistakes are due to not engaging properly with a class of entities he called forms. He conceived that they were not accessible to the senses but to the mind alone. In ethics and moral psychology he developed the view that the good life requires not just a certain kind of knowledge but also habituation to healthy emotional responses and therefore harmony between the three parts of soul (reason, spirit, appetite). -
384 BCE
Aristotle
In ethics, Aristotle introduced the concept of what is usually referred to as the golden mean of moderation. He believed that every virtue resides somewhere between the vices of defect and excess. That is, one can display either too little or to much of a good thing, or a virtue. Aristotle also speaks of eudaemonia, a perfect balance of happiness and goodness interpreted classically. When humans act virtuously and live a life of rational thought and contemplation. -
Thomas Hobbes (Moral/Legal Positivism)
For Hobbes, Legal/moral positivism represented a decisive break with the intellectual tradition of common law scholarship which could no longer provide a satisfactory account of political authority. People would act on their evil impulses if left alone for themselves. Therefore, they should not be trusted to make decision on their own. -
Immanuel Kant
Deontology stems from Greek word deon which means duty, obligation, or command. As an ethical system, it is the radical opposite of utilitarianism in which it holds that the consequences of a moral decision are of no matter. An action may have beneficial results, but still unethical if performed for wrong reasons. Similarly, action may have catastrophic consequences, but still deemed moral if done on the basis of right will. -
Jeremy Bentham & John Stewart ( UTILITARINISM)
When making moral decisions, we are advised to select that action which produces the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. If balance of good or happiness or usefulness outweighs that of evil, harm, or un-happiness, then the choice is a moral one. On the other hand, if the balance of evil outweighs that of good, then the choice is immoral. Due to this emphasis on the outcome of ethical decisions, utilitarianism is classified as a consequentialist theory. -
John Rawls
Rawls was the most significant political philosopher ever to emerge from the United States. Rawls sentiment was that political was that political freedoms and material possessions be distributed as fully and widely as possible precisely because it is the right thing to do. Rawls insisted, human justice must be centered on a firm foundation comprising a first and second principle.
