Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics [Hardcover]

Simon Blackburn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 28, 2001

From political scandals at the highest levels to inflated repair bills at the local garage, we are seemingly surrounded with unethical behavior, so why should we behave any differently? Why should we go through life anchored down by rules no one else seems to follow?
Writing with wit and elegance, Simon Blackburn tackles such questions in this lively look at ethics, highlighting the complications and doubts and troubling issues that spring from the very simple question of how we ought to live. Blackburn dissects many common reasons why we are skeptical about ethics. Drawing on all-too-familiar examples from history, politics, religion and everyday personal experience, he shows how cynicism and self-consciousness can paralyze us into considering ethics a hopeless pursuit. But ethics is neither futile nor irrelevant, he assures us, but an intimate part of the nitty gritty issues of living--of birth, death, happiness, desire, freedom, pleasure, justice. Indeed, from moral dilemmas about abortion and euthanasia, to our obsession with personal rights, to our longing for a sense of meaning in life, our everyday struggles are rife with ethical issues, whether we notice it or not. Blackburn distills the arguments of Hume, Kant and Aristotle down to their essences, to underscore the timeless relevance of our voice of conscience, the pitfalls of complacency, and our concerns about truth, knowledge and human progress.
Blackburn's rare combination of depth, rigor and sparkling prose, and his distinguished ranking among contemporary philosophers, mark Being Good as an important statement on our current disenchantment with ethics. It challenges us to take a more thoughtful reading of our ethical climate and to ponder more carefully our own standards of behavior.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This is not your typical ethics book: its sleek physical dimensions mirror Simon Blackburn's intelligent but unencumbered treatment of the main threats and origins of ethics. In Being Good, Blackburn addresses the fear that "ethical claims are a kind of sham" before sketching a road map of the history of ethics, its practical consequences, and its ultimate foundations. All this is an ambitious task for such a diminutive volume.

A professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, Blackburn is one of the giants of contemporary moral theory and a trustworthy guide through its labyrinth. He prefers parsimony to complexity--helpful for readers with only a casual acquaintance with philosophy--yet he manages to avoid trivializing his subject matter. Moreover, Being Good is wonderfully enlivened by illustrations by Paul Klee, William Blake, Eugène Delacroix, Francisco de Goya, and even Vietnam War photography and cartoons. Blackburn concludes on a promising note: "If we are careful, and mature, and imaginative, and fair, and nice, and lucky, the moral mirror in which we gaze at ourselves may not show us saints. But it need not show us monsters, either." --Eric de Place

From Publishers Weekly

When faced with an ethical dilemma, should we seek solutions that offer the greatest good or happiness to the greatest number of people? Are there any universal laws or principles by which ethical conduct should be governed? From what sources are ethical principles derived? Cambridge philosopher Blackburn addresses these and other questions in this straightforward introduction to ethics, a companion to his Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy. In part one, he considers seven subjects religion, relativism, evolutionary theory, egoism, determinism, unreasonable demands and false consciousness "that seem to suggest that ethics is somehow impossible." For example, relativism (the idea there is no one truth but different truths), he argues, often ends in nihilism, or the notion that there are indeed no values and no truth. Next, Blackburn discusses several ethical theories, including deontology (the theory that our ethical actions must be governed by rules) and utilitarianism (the theory that our ethical actions must be governed by their consequences), as well as rights theories and Kant's categorical imperative, which elevates duty to universal law. In a final section, Blackburn suggests that neither Kant, rights theories, deontology or utilitarianism provide adequate grounds for being good. Rather, he argues, "ethical principles are those that would be agreed in any reasonable cooperative procedure for coming to one mind about our conduct." Unfortunately, Blackburn never develops his idea about a common point of view for judging our conduct (he doesn't explain, for instance, how such a cooperative transaction can take place when partners in the conversation are using different ethical languages), and that is where this little book, which is so rich in analysis, falters significantly. Illus.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 172 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (June 28, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192100521
• ISBN-13: 978-0192100528
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #505,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He was Edna J. Doury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, and from 1969 to 1990 was a Fellow and Tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford. He is the author of The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and the best-selling Think and Being Good, among other books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ethics, Short and Clear, August 3, 2001

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R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics (Hardcover)

Philosophy is important. "What is our place in the universe?" is not just a scientific question. What is the meaning of life, how can we be happy, do gods make a difference? All are good philosophical questions, not really to be left just to professional philosophers. It has taken centuries, but philosophers led us into the idea that humans have certain rights, something we take for granted now although we are not always good at ensuring every human gets the rights that are due. We can allow that human well-being is pretty much the gold standard in assessing values, and perhaps we take into account animal well-being, as well as the well-being of the Earth as a biological system. We think we can behave morally, but we have doubts that this can occur without gods of some sort. Gods or not, we sense that there is some larger meaning, and that selfishness just won't do, but selfishness seems to run a great deal of the world. It wouldn't be a bad thing if we could think about these ethical, philosophical issues with more clarity.

And so professional philosopher Simon Blackburn has given us _Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics_ (Oxford University Press). He has distilled thousands of years of thinking on ethical issues by various philosophers into a slim book. It may not be a Guide for Living covering every situation, but it is an admirable introduction about how philosophers think about such matters, and where we ought to look for ethical answers. His book is witty and pithy, and demonstrates that thinking about big ideas can be fun. But we are largely on our own in this endeavor. Socrates, in Plato's _Euthyphro_, provided the classic challenge to the idea that ethics must have a religious foundation. Whatever gods there are that choose right and wrong for us cannot do so arbitrarily; they have to select such things correctly. Most gods have a system that demonstrates that we should act correctly because of fear of punishment if we don't, or desire for reward if we do. This distorts behavior into "a religious cost-benefit analysis." Kant said true virtue was living up to a rule out of respect for that rule, not on post-mortem consequences. It is up to us to make judgements on what rules are worth living up to. Blackburn takes us through the pitfalls of relativism, that there is no one truth but only the different truths of different communities and times. He discusses our current obsession with rights, and even includes as an appendix the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human rights. Death, birth, desire, and pleasure all have chapters in his work, all fitting essays within the larger whole.

Hume (whom Blackburn seems mostly to follow) said that rational, scientific proof of the virtue of an action is not possible. Blackburn does not despair over what others have seen as this unsafe or uncomforting doctrine. We share some values, and we can judge actions as reasonable or not by referring to those shared values. Blackburn (again with Hume) argues that the ultimate standard for judging an action is its capacity to promote happiness. He unites this with the modern philosophical ideas of contracts between humans and the state, both caring about such things as liberty and safety, in a dialogue to find common points of view. Blackburn's view is optimistic. We have made progress with sensitivity to the environment, to sexual differences, and to toleration of cultural differences. "If we are careful, and mature, and imaginative, and fair, and nice, and lucky, the moral mirror in which we gaze at ourselves may not show us saints. But it need not show us monsters, either."

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good enough, December 2, 2002

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StalkingGhostBear "collecting dust" (Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics (Hardcover)

"Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics" is just that, a slim volume about the philosophy of ethics and how philosophers think about this subject. It is an introduction for people who are brave (or fooligh) enough to dare to ask "Why be good?". Far to few people it seems have bothered to ask this question or assumed there is a patent answer without ever taking that answer out into the daylight to examine it.
Thinking ethically isn't done in a vacuum, it is of a process. When faced with an ethical problem, how do you seek a solution? Do you try to maximize the good for the most people? Do you try to identify universal laws and then try to follow them? Do you seek the advice of authority figures or authoritative books?
The text is split into three distance parts, the first addresses what Mr. Blackburn refers to "threats to ethics." These threats include relativism, skepticism, nihilism, challenges to free will, and altruism. Threats are largely those things which suggest that there is no real reason to be good at all; it's just something we as a people do. With each topic, he explains why they do not make ethics "impossible" after all. Mr. Blackburn explains how religion's declining influence does not harm ethical thinking, in fact he views this in a positive light in that without religion frees us to make independent choices, rather than to simply be automatons. Relativism is a more serious challenge, but when taken to its logical conclusion relativism refutes itself and removes the arguer from the conversation altogether.

The second section discusses particular attitudes about ethical issues including birth, death, desire and the meaning of life, pleasure, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, freedom from the bad, freedom and paternalism, and rights and natural rights. This second section is the weakest and seems to be ill connected to the other two. This weakness is there despite the fact that the author is talking about such hot topics as abortion and euthanasia.

The third section looks at the larger question of whether the idea of ethics rests on anything at all. This I believe is the topic that unsettles most people. The thinking goes that without a basis there is no reason for ethics. Mr. Blackburn shows this to not be the case. Mr. Blackburn believes people should actively engage in ethical dialogue in an effort to arrive at a common point of view for making ethical decisions. This of course means that there is no guarantee that such conversation will be successful, but at least there is a chance, and without such a dialogue, there is no chance at all.

The book is demanding of its reader. It demands that one actually look at one's ethical system and see it for what it is.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The book is not my style., February 10, 2009

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Charles John Dyrsten "chuck d" (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics (Hardcover)

Blackburn doesn't seem to make very many coherent sentences or chapters. I think that his thought process is very interesting, but the book is hard to read because of his poor writing skills, as I judge anyway. He does have some very interesting examples and one-liners throughout the book and I don't regret finishing it at all, so a decent read; but it's certainly not the be all, end all of ethics introductions.