Principles of Ethics (Second Edition)

Author: Wang Haoming
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-08-01
Features: Ethics is the science of formulating methods for good morals, the process of formulation, and the means of implementation. Humanity itself is the highest value. A person should not pursue vanity against their conscience but should pursue glory with their conscience. Until the end of the 19th century, ethics and "normative ethics" were the same concept. In 1903, Moore published Principia Ethica, announcing the birth of another kind of ethics—meta-ethics. For the next half-century, meta-ethics held a dominant position in Western ethics. Since the 1960s, meta-ethics, which attempted to stand alone and detach itself from normative ethics, began to decline. Replacing it were, on one hand, the revival of "normative ethics," and on the other, the rise of "virtue ethics," which opposed normative ethics. This textbook, guided by Marxism, integrates the thoughts of ethics from ancient and modern China and the world, for the first time combining the mutually exclusive meta-ethics, normative ethics, and virtue ethics into a single science: it is the first textbook in China that attempts to align with international standards while surpassing today's Western ethics.