Introduction

Summary

Ethics has triple vision. It looks to the past and concerns what we have done, why we have done it, and how we did it. It also views our ongoing activities in three dimensions of what we do: its what, why, and how. What we do (our “deeds”), why we do it (our motivation for acting), and how we do it (the manner in which we act) are morally important. Beyond concern with all this, ethics requires us to choose well among our options and, so far as we can, to realize good ones, to do so for good reasons, and to do it in the right ways. From the moral point of view, what kind of person we are is evidenced by our past actions, manifested in our present conduct, and confirmed or disconfirmed in our future conduct. All three basic dimensions of conduct – our deeds, our reasons for doing them, and the manners in which we do them – are explored in this book.