Customer Reviews

How Should We Live?: An Introduction to Ethics

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This text is a case study in how far one can achieve accessibility in an introductory text without sacrificing precision and accuracy. Pojman does not achieve the balance, I'm afraid. I selected this book for its clear, non-technical style and its range of topics (more specifically, for its balance of issues in normative ethics and metaethics). But in several chapters, I have found myself spending most of the class time correcting the mistakes, sloppy reasoning, and caricatures of different views that pervade the text. The chapter on Religion and Ethics is especially embarrassing, running roughshod over key distinctions at every turn, making no mention of the key developments in the last few decades, and generally just making a mess of the whole discussion. Needless to say, I do not recommend this book.

This book is one big snore. Unfortunately, it was not an interesting read, and I ended up not finishing it out of pure boredom.