Moral Philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche

Our age is suspicious of moral philosophy. We tend to assume that its central question—“What is the human good?”—however important, is not answerable. Yet, in our daily lives, we cannot help but take for granted that certain things are good and others are not. Relativists in theory but not in practice, we are at odds with ourselves. That we are troubled by this tension between what we think and what we do—we sense that it is bad to be divided against ourselves in this way—is a compelling reason to study the various answers that have been given to the question of the human good. We will turn to the books of some of the seminal thinkers of the tradition of Western philosophy in order to gain clarity about the fundamental moral alternatives—to discover the origins and implications of the underlying (and frequently hidden) principles of contemporary morality—with the naïve hope that we may be able to answer the question of the human good. Readings will include selections from Genesis, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Locke, Swift, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche.