THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL
In ethics, as in so many other fields, we have recklessly and willfully abandoned our great classical-Christian heritage. We have even degraded the very words without which ethical discourse cannot carry on, words like virtue, love, temperance. As a result, we are totally ignorant, totally uneducated in the subject that of all conceivable subjects, is most important. We have no ideas to think with and therefore are only too ready to believe that ethics is a field where thinking does no good. Who knows anything today of the Seven Deadly Sins or of the Four Cardinal Virtues? Who can even name them? And if these venerable, old ideas are thought not to be worth bothering about, what new ideas have taken their place? It is not as if we had to invent anything new; at the same time, it is not good enough merely to revert to the old formulations. …Our task – and the task of…
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