This course addresses some of the eternal questions that man has grappled with since the beginning of time. What is good? What is bad? Why is justice important? Why is it better to be good and just than it is to be bad and unjust? Most human beings have the faculty to discern between right and wrong, good and bad behavior, and to make judgments over what is just and what is unjust. But why are ethics important to us? This course looks at our history as ethical beings. We’ll travel into the very heart of mankind’s greatest philosophical dilemmas—to the origins of our moral values and the problem of ethics. Are ethics universal, absolute and unchanging—or are they culturally relative, changing, and man-made? Furthermore, we’ll delve into the creation of ethical systems—not just for ourselves, but also for society at large. And we will consider the ongoing process of establishing ethical frameworks for society.
Peter Kreeft is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He has degrees from both Calvin College and Fordham University, where he also earned his Ph.D. He has taught a broad range of courses covering scores of topics related to philosophy and religion and has written numerous books on similar topics, including Socrates Meets Jesus: History's Greatest Questioner Confronts the Claims of Christ.
Lecture 1 Being Good and Everything Else: An Introduction
Lecture 2 Being Good and Being Traditional: Why Do We Call It “Ancient Wisdom”?
Lecture 3 Being Good and Being Wise: Can Virtue Be Taught?
Lecture 4 Being Good and Being Pious: Plato’s Euthyphro
Lecture 5 Being Good and Being Happy: Plato’s Republic
Lecture 6 Aristotle’s Ethics
Lecture 7 Being Good and Being Successful: Aquinas on the Meaning of Life.
Lecture 8 Being Good and Being Successful According to Machiavelli: Is It Either/Or?
Lecture 9 Being Good and Being Evil: Is Humanity Naturally Good? (Hobbes vs. Rousseau)
Lecture 10 Being Good and Being Scientific: Can Morality Be a Science? (Descartes, Hume, Mill)
Lecture 11 Being Good and Being Fair: The Ethics of Kant
Lecture 12 Being Good and Being Secular: Can an Atheist Be Ethical? The Ethics of Jean-Paul Sartre
Lecture 13 Being Good in Eastern Ethics
Lecture 14 Being Good and Surviving: Ethics and the Future of Western Civilization