Platos Ethics: Aristotle, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, and Richard Dawkins - Essay Example

Plato assumes a virtue-based take on the issue of ethics. According to him, human well-being is the highest aim of moral conduct and thought. To attain it, one requires a set of dispositions and skills. His view of happiness is that it is elusive. The morality of happiness, Plato takes a rather subdued point of view. This is because he views happiness differently compared to other philosophers. Secondly, he treats happiness as a kind of perfection that is difficult to attain.

 Aristotle bases his theories on ethics on good action. Like Plato, he believes in the idea of virtue as the central point in living a good life. He points to a good understanding of what virtues such as courage, justice,e, and temperance have on the individual’s endeavor at attaining happiness. He points to these virtues since they are, according to him, what one needs to appreciate pleasure, friendship, honor, wealth, virtue,e and other goods in life. Accordingly, one cannot acquire wisdom simply by acquiring knowledge about general rules.

David Hume Hume is famous for his empiricist theory of the mind which asserts that reason is a slave of passions; moral distinctions are not derived from reason; moral distinctions are derived from moral sentiments; and virtues are either natural or artificial. Humethinksn that passions (feelings, emotions, desires) are mere impressions that are very different from ideas that are original, vivid,d and lively perceptions. This is because passions, according to Hume, control reasoning and desires.

Bertrand Russell Russell put forth a lot of opinions about marriage, war, and the rights of women. In all his writings, Russell insisted on one’s having an open mind toward handling the issues in their life. He despised obstinacy in the face of counter-arguments since it is not a virtue when in a scientifically-minded thinker. To Russell, virtues meant assessing a given argument from the point of view of one with enough information and with an open mind to allow them to take the most sensible side.

John Stuart Mill Mill is quoted to have said that “the effect produced, in social phenomena, by any complex set of circumstances, amounts precisely to the sum of the effects of circumstances taken singly.” He thus emphasized the effects of one’s actions on the majority and beyond the individual. He deduced this idea from the writings of Auguste Comte and other philosophers during his time or before him. His basis for ethics was thus a focus on the result of one’s actions. Richard Dawkins Dawkins is famous for his theories on evolutionary ethics.

They included descriptive evolutionary ethics and normative evolutionary ethics. In both, he insisted on the ethical contents in any given situation determined by the evolutionary history of the given species and how it has learned to respond to that situation. Essentially, he cited natural selection as one of the major determinants of ethics. To him, something was ethical as long as it has evolutionary importance.