The best books about personal values in ethics

What makes for a good life, or a beautiful one, or, perhaps most important, a meaningful one? Throughout history, most of us have looked to our faith, our relationships, or our deeds for the answer. But in A Significant Life, philosopher Todd May offers an exhilarating new way of thinking about these questions, one deeply attuned to life as it actually is: a work in progress, a journey—and often a narrative. Offering moving accounts of his own life and memories alongside rich engagements with philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein and Bernard Williams, he shows us where to find the significance of our lives: in the way we live them.

In the last five decades, ethical theory has been preoccupied by a turn to reasons. The vocabulary of reasons has become a common currency not only in ethics, but in epistemology, action theory, and many related areas. It is now common, for example, to see central theses such as evidentialism in epistemology and egalitarianism in political philosophy formulated in terms of reasons. And some have even claimed that the vocabulary of reasons is so useful precisely because reasons have analytical and explanatory priority over other normative concepts-that reasons in that sense come first.

This is my first academic book (I published my first poetry book a year earlier). It's based on my DPhil dissertation, written at Oxford between 1987 and 1991 under the supervision of Geoffrey Marshall. It took me three more years to reshape the dissertation into a book. It's argued that one of the problems of any political system is that the principles which underlie and characterize it might also, through their application, endanger it and bring about its destruction. Democracy, in its liberal form, is no exception. Moreover, because democracy is a relatively young phenomenon, it lacks experience in dealing with pitfalls involved in the working of the system. This is the "catch" of democracy theory.

The Origins of Ethical Failure marries a unique professional experience with research from the behavioural sciences to explain why ethical failures occur within institutions. In the largely revised second edition, not only has the research referenced been updated, but the book takes a more targeted approach and uses the Australian banking and finance industry as the case study (an industry that has been the subject of considerable attention over the past decade due to failures in governance). The book illustrates that when the conditions are permissive, humans have a predisposition towards dishonesty, and therefore, to reduce the likelihood of ethical failure, leaders must focus obsessively on putting in place appropriate institutional arrangements.

Few, if any, of us are complete strangers to the at least occasional frustration of having proceeded in a way that was self-defeating. My book focuses on how challenging choice situations and messy preference structures can lead to self-defeating patterns of choice over time. The relevant patterns are associated with being tempted or torn and include cases of procrastination. Theories of rational choice often dismiss or abstract away from the sort of messiness that I focus on. They assume that rational agents can and should have neat preferences over their options; but, given the complexity of life, this assumption is problematic. Ultimately, I show that rationality can validate certain messy or ‘disorderly’ preference structures while also protecting us from self-defeating patterns of choice.  

Most books on neoliberalism focus on public policy and economic statistics, without really addressing the core question: if neoliberalism has failed so spectacularly to deliver economic stability and shared prosperity, why do we keep going along with it? My answer is that neoliberalism is not just a political or economic system, but a moral one based on the value of free choice. But the freedom it offers is a trap – the system gives us just enough freedom to take the blame for bad outcomes, but not enough to really change our circumstances.

Emma Worm is excited for her worm family to have their portrait taken. But when she sees her other friends' portraits, she gets discouraged. "We had the most beautiful smiles," Ellie the Chipmunk squeals. Abigail the Cat meows, "I looked gorgeous with my big poufy hair." The worm family doesn't have teeth...how will they show their beautiful smiles? They don't have hair either...how can it look big and poufy?! So Emma gathers wigs, giant fake teeth, and colorful clothing for her parents and sisters.

But it's only after taking off their costumes that the worm family is able to wriggle and squiggle and squeeze into a delightful pose that only a worm family can make. And Emma? She thinks it's perfectly perfect.

A wild ride on the madcap streets of Guatemala City. A twilight walk through old Havana with a Cuban mailman. A canoe trip in search of a lost grave in the Everglades. A late-night visit to a border-town casino. A tour of an outdated factory in a post-Soviet backwater. These are some of the experiences that the wide-ranging essays in Topographies describe. Originally published in newspapers, magazines, and journals such as The Miami Herald and Washington Post, these travel essays eloquently inform and entertain armchair travelers and general-interest readers who appreciate learning about little-known historical events and encountering unusual characters.

The future will be better than you think. Thriving shows how innovation can regenerate nature, society, and the economy by taking us from degradation to restoration of ecosystems, from depletion to renewal of resources, from disparity to responsibility in communities, from disease to revitalization of health, from disconnection to rewiring through technology, and from disruption to resilience of infrastructure and institutions.

Thriving is not an exercise in blind optimism about technology or other miracle-cure solutions; rather, it is an accessible approach to systems thinking and an offer of pragmatic hope based on purpose-driven creativity and innovation. Whether you’re a progressive leader, a professional in the sustainability field, or someone who simply wants to be better informed about ways to take positive action, this thorough guide is for you.

From Socrates to Thoreau, most philosophers, moralists, and religious leaders have seen frugality as a virtue and have associated simple living with wisdom, integrity, and happiness. But why? And are they right? Is a taste for luxury fundamentally misguided? If one has the means to be a spendthrift, is it foolish or reprehensible to be extravagant?

In this book, Emrys Westacott examines why, for more than two millennia, so many philosophers and people with a reputation for wisdom have been advocating frugality and simple living as the key to the good life. He also looks at why most people have ignored them, but argues that, in a world facing an environmental crisis, it may finally be time to listen to the advocates of a simpler way of life.