4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fantastic, Easy, and Well-Structured Introduction to the Field of Ethics, August 24, 2011
This review is from: The Ethics Toolkit: A Compendium of Ethical Concepts and Methods (Wiley Desktop Editions) (Paperback)
Please ignore the review given by A. James. His two-star review couldn't have been more off the mark.
I not only read this book, I read it twice! And I'm still going back through it and reading sections again. And I've covered the pages with underlines and comments. That is testament to the book's ability to make a person think and to fire up their creative imaginations.
I'll get right to the point that I think most potential readers will be curious about: readability!
I would have no hesitation in recommending this book to the general reader who is interested in Ethics. In fact it's the only book that I would recommend (with one exception). I have a limited college background in philosophy (about 12 credit hours) but have continued to read and learn ever since. And even philosophy professors will tell you that books on philosophy are often unnecessarily difficult, even for college professors!
Hegel, for example, is extremely difficult to read, even for philosophy majors. And even then you almost have to make a career out of Hegel to properly understand him. I finally gave up trying. You are far better off reading *about* Hegel's ideas (by authors who are qualified to explain them) than trying to decipher them for yourself if you are not a philosophy major. Even scholars find him a chore. The same can be said about Nietzsche and Marx.
The point is that many if not most philosophical concepts can be grasped by people of average intelligence, when they are explained properly. But philosophy books are generally not written that way. There are several reasons for this. One is that philosophy is a very rigorous pursuit. Philosophers must anticipate the possible objections of other philosophers; and in that pursuit they often leave no stone unturned. Another reason is that the field is unavoidably jargon heavy. And since philosophy is built on the ideas of past philosophers, there is no easy way out of this dilemma. Therefore, many if not most books on philosophy can be a bit daunting to the general reader, to put it mildly!
The Ethics Toolkit is a rare and welcome exception! So I can wholeheartedly recommend it to the general reader.
I found most sections easy to grasp. It's impossible to entirely eliminate the jargon, but the authors have struck just the right balance between jargon and informal language. Basically, each heading is about about a single concept or group of related concepts, but the text *describing* those concepts are purposely written as jargon-free as possible. Some topics are more difficult to decipher than others. Every now and then I would have to reread a section a few times to make sure I fully understood it. But I would say 95% of the text is readily graspable for the sophisticated general reader.
I don't think there could possibly be a simpler and more thorough introduction to Ethics out there. I bought two other lengthy books on ethics and this one was far superior than the other two, in both ease of reading and scholarly authority. There was no comparison between them.
I can think of only one other book that would be an easier and less jargon-heavy introduction to Ethics, called "Ethical Reasoning", published by the Foundation for Critical Thinking. It's more like a thick pamphlet (60 pages or so). It's not as jargon heavy and is even better suited to the general reader. If you're interested in Ethics I would recommend both books. The main difference is that the Ethics Toolkit uses more of the language used by ethicists. In other words, it introduces you to the terms and concepts used by contemporary practitioners in the field to a degree than "Ethical Reasoning" does not, and is more thorough as well. Ethical Reasoning also uses plainer language, with the intent of getting the *ideas* across more so than the jargon. In other words, they convert some the technical terms to plain language before discussing them. I think there's a need for both formats. I have high praise for both books. Neither replaces the other.
That brings me to another asset of The Ethics Toolkit. The way it's laid out it can be read cover to cover (as I read it, twice), or it can be used as a reference book. It's actually laid out as a reference book, but it is ordered so that it can also be read cover to cover. That's one of the things I liked about it. If I hadn't wanted to read it cover to cover, I could have easily found exactly what I was looking for and nothing more. I wish more books were written that way.
This means that if you prefer, you could read Ethical Reasoning (by the Foundation for Critical Thinking) first and have The Ethics Toolkit handy if you needed it for a reference source. Or, having read Ethical Reasoning (an easy read), reading The Ethics Toolkit might then be less daunting. But I still would recommend the Ethics Toolkit, even for the general reader, as a starting point.
In fact, with ethics being so seldom discussed in public forums---except in short and uninformed sound-bytes---I can say that I think the Ethics Toolkit is not only an informative book but an *important* book. Scholars routinely underestimate the importance of informing and educating the general public---one of my pet peeves. Well, that oversight has now been corrected for the field of Ethics. For anyone who wants to discuss ethics in any reasonable way (but who lacks a philosophy degree) it is *must* reading, in fact. I would even go so far as to say that after having read this book, you would be ready to tackle almost any book on ethics. It will give you the broad understanding you need to proceed to more in-depth discussions.
I wish everyone would read it.
Oh, and I thought of another great asset of the book. It provides a reading list of the most pertinent thinkers in the field of ethics. This book broke the mold as an introduction to the field. It can never be excelled. The authors keep updating it, though. So the only competition they have is from themselves.
:-)
And as to the reviewer who said that it was biased. He doesn't know what he's talking about. The authors went to great pains to *avoid* bias and to point out where certain terms and concepts might inadvertently *lead* to bias. To claim otherwise is asinine.
EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK!
:-)
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