The point of view adopted in this book is that of the Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis, the living tradition of the perennial philosophy, that applies the wisdom of the ancients, tried and proved in the crucible of historical experience, to the discoveries and problems of modern life.
However, the author does not regard the Aristotelian-Thomistic system as such an historical crystallization that all thinking must henceforth cease.
He has incorporated whatever seems worth while in later speculations, not in a spirit of irresponsible eclecticism, but as a genuine development, extension, clarification, or application of Aristotelian-Thomistic principles.
Because ethics is not the logical place to begin the study of philosophy, it will be presupposed that the student has already had some training in the basic concepts of the Aristotelian-Thomistic system.
For this reason no effort has been made to explain or demonstrate the presuppositions of ethics. To do this adequately would require the inclusion of almost the whole of philosophy in this one volume; to do it inadequately would be worse than useless.
However, the student lacking previous philosophical training may be able to accept these presuppositions provisionally and to await their demonstration in another course.
Ethics is a part of philosophy, and an effort has been made to preserve the philosophical approach throughout.
Because ethics is practical philosophy, some excursion into the domains of sociology, economics, and political science is inevitable, especially in applied ethics, but the author believes that even the most concrete problems can be viewed in the true spirit of philosophical inquiry.
As a rule the problem method has been used.
This consists in introducing one of the major problems of ethics, explaining how it arose and why it is a problem, giving the main schools of thought on the subject with sufficient historical background, stating the arguments for and against each proposed solution, weighing the arguments against one another, and finally resolving the problem in the light of the evidence and reasoning involved.
Of course, each problem will result in a thesis to be maintained, but the author thinks that the questioning approach is a better instance of the philosophical attitude than an immediate launching into the demonstration of a set thesis.
For this reason a syllogistic argument is not first stated and then explained and defended, but is used rather as a summary of the whole investigation.
Fairly numerous quotations from the classical philosophers are interspersed for the purpose of letting each philosopher explain his own position as well as of encouraging the student to explore some of these sources for himself.
Reading lists at the end of each chapter are meant by way of suggestion both to teacher and student and make no pretense of being exhaustive. As a rule, textbooks are omitted from these lists, not because they are unimportant, but because they are so obvious.
