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Andrej Karpathy
“A reasonably comprehensive introduction to Moral Philosophy. In first portion it touches on basic issues such as what is morality and how objective is it? How is it related to religion and can it exist without it? The second portion discusses a few historically important ideas and people in the field: - Ethical egoism (do what's best for you) - Utilitarianism (do what's best for an average person in expectation) - Kant's theory (follow rules you'd think would make good universal rules) - Social contract theory (follow rules that self-interested rational people can agree on for mutual benefit) - Theory of virtues (just be fair, honest, just, courageous, civil, .... 50 other things here) It's a good book and I liked it (i.e. 3 stars), but there's also several things I disliked: - The chapters and topics seem strangely chosen and there is no coherent theme throughout the book that emerged. It seems to be a set of individually chosen, arbitrarily split or merged and randomly arranged set of topics. There is no overlaying theme or flow. One of the chapters near the end just suddenly and randomly includes whole paragraphs summarizing the book so far. Why is that placed there? Sometimes this chaos can be distracting. - The author seemingly can't resist injecting his own views into all parts of the exposition, sometimes strongly agreeing or mocking various historical ideas without fully expanding on his reasons. This can be distracting: I wanted an as-objective-as-possible exploration of different ideas and a collection of arguments/counter-arguments that have been raised against them in the past. I don't need to know the author's personal opinion every single paragraph, especially when there is an entire section devoted to the author's views at the very end. It's good and useful stuff, but I wish it was all neatly at the end, or at least at the end of each chapter. - All his examples about what is morality involve some terminally ill patients or other medical dilemmas. The field is so much wider and touches on all kinds of interesting issues in politics and law! Very few of these connections were made. - The final chapter on author's own views is very poorly written. I tried twice and I don't understand what he's proposing. - Sometimes some arguments are not fully developed and seem almost trivially refutable, but this is not followed up on. But to be fair, it's only an introduction book and serves reasonably as such. All in all a recommended skim, especially if you're very new to the topics as I am!”