Real World Ethics

7th Feb 2024

The thinker statue in Cleveland

**TRIGGER WARNING**

Domestic violence, child abuse, racial bias, gender bias, bad language

"Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged is not, like the others, theoretical in its aim - because we are studying not to know what goodness is, but how to become good [people] men, since otherwise it would be useless - we must apply our minds to the problem of how our actions should be performed, because, as we have just said, it is these that actually determine our dispositions."

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 350BCE

OK so here’s the problem with Ethics – as Aristotle pointed out so many years ago – there’s theory and then there’s reality. Normative Ethics – Ethics in Theory – is focussed on the question of what we ‘ought’ to do or ‘How can we live a good life?’. Practical or Empirical Ethics is focused on what actually happens in reality. Our challenge, as I pointed out in the last post is - how to align our desired way of being with what w…