When your happiness, your duty and everyone else's welfare pull apart, how do you decide what is right?

In The Methods of Ethics, Henry Sidgwick asks what reasons can guide our choices—and how we know those reasons are good. He examines three paths: pursuing your own happiness, following moral rules, and seeking the greatest happiness of everyone. Each offers a different answer to the question of what we ought to do.

Sidgwick does not begin by asking you to accept his theory. He tests each method with patience, taking self-interest as seriously as duty and shared happiness. Promises, truthfulness and the rules of common sense come under close examination. The stakes are practical: can reason give us a sound basis for choosing how to act?

이 책에서 발견할 것들

• Three paths through ethics Find a clear map of egoism, intuitionism and utilitarianism, and the questions that separate them.
• The challenge of happiness Explore why pursuing your own happiness raises difficult questions about what you can measure.
• Duty under close examination Look closely at promises and truthfulness, where familiar rules prove less precise than they seem.
• Everyone's happiness counts Examine the case for weighing each person's happiness equally when deciding what is right.
• A fairer way to argue Learn from a thinker who tests competing views without giving his own side an easy victory.

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