Summary
Ernst Tugendhat: Lectures on Ethics
The idea of establishing moral judgments and, therefore, a concept of morality, encounters a methodological difficulty that has always represented a philosophical challenge: they cannot be founded either as an empirical finding, which Hume wanted to be satisfied with, or a priori, from a pure practical mind, as Kant hoped, and especially not from transcendent premises, as was the case with traditionalist or pre-Enlightenment concepts of morality. In Lectures on Ethics, Tugendhat approaches the problem of establishing morality on several levels. First of all, he develops his understanding of what it means to establish a certain morality - contrary to all pretensions to an absolute foundation, he claims that a credible foundation of morality today can only be proving its plausibility, and that in two steps: first, the plausibility of the reasons for the decision to accept a certain morality at all, and, second, the greater plausibility of a certain concept of morality compared to competing ones. Further, on this basis, he argues a certain concept of morality, a variant of the Kantian morality of rules, complemented by elements of Adam Smith's morality of virtue. Finally, this book with an overview and critically elaborated typology of different conceptions of morality, along with extensive interpretations by Aristotle, Smith and especially Kant, is an excellent introduction to the history of ethics.
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