The most recommended ethics books

Drawing on years of business school teaching and research and leading negotiation trainings in many countries, Shell provides an important guide for people to stand up for their values in business, law, and complex work situations. Real-world stories put flesh on the bones of outlines of both philosophical and political approaches to difficult choices in career and workplace negotiations. This book can assist any negotiator in figuring out what is really important to them (and their clients and organizations) and then how to actualize behaviors that make principled change happen. This book also provides great advice about when to walk away from the negotiation table or a particular task or job because higher values call.

Williams was one of the most creative and engaging moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a student at Oxford of E.R. Dodds. While Dodds reminded his readers of how strange the Greeks are to us, in terms of their religious practices, Williams reminds us that the Greeks are also very like us in the moral problems they confronted. Rejecting the idea that modern people have given up on “shame” in favor of “guilt,” Williams showed that we still share the same concerns as the conflicted characters of Greek tragedy – like them, for good and for ill, we gain our sense of ourselves and our moral worth from the reactions of the those around us. 

Humor is a gift, and Sarah Monzon does not disappoint. Nicole is a curvy girl who has the moxie to insist that her body isn’t the problem but more likely the clothing manufacturer. The main character, Nicole, is well-developed. The male heroine, Drew, pulled me into this story. He was flawed, which made him feel real—which was important because he is a dream with his positive attitude and quick wit. The chemistry between the two is full of sparks while remaining sweet and clean. This book upholds traditional Christian values.

This book personally helped me focus on and get interested in the concept of acting for reasons.

We all do things for reasons (good or bad), e.g. we take an umbrella because outside it’s raining, but what this exactly means is a philosophical puzzle. Dancy is probably the most powerful in arguing that we don’t normally find those reasons in ourselves, but in how things objectively are or might be.

Even when all we can say is “I do it because it’s my desire”, there has to be something attractive in what we desire beyond the fact that we desire it, which is one way to bring us back to the old idea of the guise of the good.

This book dazzles me every time I read it. It will change the way you think about files and how such humble little documents can help rule our lives. Vismann’s Files is not the easiest going, but it is filled with enough history and detail that one can just join for the ride and follow along. The late Cornelia Vismann died too young but she still managed to leave us with this truly transformative account of the relation between law and the data systems upon which all law always relies. Through a careful history that stretches from parchment scrolls to mid-twentieth-century secret intelligence files to the desktop computer, Vismann excavates the way in which the ethics, politics, and legality of social systems are highly dependent upon data designs.

This collection of essays by some of the leading contemporary scholars in ethics and in economics provides both critical surveys of the various interactions between these two bodies of thought and original suggestions for future advancements in this important intersection.

The collection includes both general and theoretical inquiries and more specific applications. It may be of interest both to academics (scholars and students) and to policymakers and laypersons.

This work, from a former President of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA), illuminatingly sifts the major theories of international relations, of development and of related theories of ethics.

Readers will value, as Robin does, seeing how all these theories interrelate and support development that recognises human needs. This is a work at the interface of Applied Philosophy and International Relations, and embodies an insightful analysis of connections between these fields. 

I am tempted to say: Because Frank is a delightful writer and leave it at that.

This book reiterates similar themes in discussing how a variety of supposedly non-economic factors affect economic decisions.

In this book Frank discusses how noble human tendencies (moral sentiments) may have not only survived the pressures of the material world, but actually have been nurtured by them. The title is a play on the David Hume quote that “Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

To those interested, I also recommend any of Frank’s other books including Choosing the Right Pond, The Winner Take All Society, and The Darwin Economy. 

The philosopher who invented deconstruction sets out—in a philosophical tour de force—to dismantle the grounds on which Western philosophy (and the Abrahamic religions) attempt to maintain the absolute difference in kind between the human and the animal.

Derrida’s point, I want to emphasize, is not that humans and animals are “the same,” but rather that the distinction between “the human” and “the animal” is of no use in trying to understand the wild diversity of life forms on earth and the ways in which they are entwined. At stake here too is our (often disavowed) relationship to our own animality.

An academic and scholarly read? Yes. But one that also takes very seriously what Derrida sometimes calls the animal “genocide” currently taking place underneath “normal” everyday life in developments such as mass extinction and factory farming.

This collection explores a fascinating and currently highly relevant puzzle concerning cases in which the contribution of a single individual will not make the difference between success and failure with respect to a certain important goal (e.g., achieving decent air quality) because the contribution (e.g., walking to the store instead of driving) is too insignificant given the scale of the goal.

In such cases, it might seem not only tempting but permissible or even required that the individual refrain from contributing and instead spend her energy and resources in some more effective way (so as to actually make a difference with respect to some morally or rationally important goal).

Yet, if all reason in this way and refrain from contributing, the important collective goal will not be achieved at all.