Why and Because: The Art and Science of Moral and Ethical Understanding

By Lawrence Sheraton

A Different Kind of Book

Every major tradition in moral philosophy is prescriptive. Aristotle gives you virtues to cultivate. Kant gives you duties to follow. Mill gives you outcomes to maximize. Rawls gives you principles derived from an original position. Each framework produces verdicts. Each asks you to accept its premises.

The Sheraton framework does something categorically different. It gives you a method, and trusts that applying this method honestly will produce ethical truth in the same way that applying mathematical reasoning produces correct answers.

The tools for finding ethical truth are not found in a sacred text, tradition, or institutions. They are inside you. The capacity to feel, to ask honest questions, to imagine yourself in another person's position: these are not learned behaviors. They are innate and the foundations which ethical understanding is built.

Deriving ethics is reasonably easy, and it relies on "The Four Intuitions." These are elusive obvious concepts. Concepts that are intuitive but are so fundamental to our thinking that we often lack the words to describe what we are doing. This book provides the words that define the processes and in so doing, will seem obvious once you read them. Yet, it has taken this long to properly decode these intuitions into a workable framework that any person, in any culture can use to deride ethical truth. This framework has been tested with AI and it allows AI to derive ethical truth remarkably well. This is no longer theory, it's been tested and it works.
The hard part of deriving ethics is unlearning the cultural conditioning you have been immersed in all your life. Culture can enhance or retard your ethical understanding, and your internal openness to introspection can have the same affect. Much of the book focuses on these effects.

Who This Is For?

This book does not require a background in philosophy. It requires something simpler and possibly harder: the willingness to ask honest questions and follow them wherever they lead.

It is for people who have sensed that the moral frameworks handed to them by religion, by culture, by politics, do not hold up under scrutiny. It is for people who want to think clearly about hard questions rather than defer to authority. And it is for anyone who has wondered whether the profound ethical challenges of this moment in history, including the arrival of artificial intelligence, will require something more solid to stand on than inherited convention.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692903089
• ISBN13: 9780692903087
• Release Date: July 2017
• Publisher: Lawrence Sheraton Publishing
• Length: 116 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"