Sublime

But a personal morality is simply the making of rules for yourself that will guide your conduct toward what you want and away from what you don’t want. And the rules are made by examining alternative sets of consequences in important matters. Your knowledge will tell you what consequences you believe will ensue from any given action; and only your

I can summarize a thousand years of moral philosophy in a few sentences: pre–Hobbes and Bentham, human nature was viewed as a battle between our desire to be good and our temptations to behave badly, and the gist of moral philosophy and religious faith was that we should treat each other as we want to be treated ourselves—the golden rule—and we sho

in the long term under such conditions. Morality is the history of humanity’s attempts to construct a common life on the basis of shared codes, conventions and convictions.

But on a true philosophy there is no other umpire than virtue and insight; for there is no luck or ill-luck except wisdom and the reverse.

“It is natural” has never been an adequate defense for immoral behavior in the Jewish legal system.