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No one chooses evil; no one chooses to act in ignorance.No one would intentionally harm themselves. When harm comes to us, although we thought we were seeking the good, the good is not obtained in such a case since we lacked knowledge as to how best to achieve the good.
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Happiness or well-being (eudaimonia) is the highest aim of moral thought and conduct, and the virtues (aretê: 'excellence') are the requisite skills and dispositions needed to attain it.
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The role of habit in conduct. It is commonly thought that virtues are habits and that the good life is a life of mindless routine.
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Humans are essentially souls, using their bodies as a means to achieve their spiritual ends.
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Happiness is based on two principles, the autarky (autonomy), and the ataraxia, the tranquility of the spirit. To achieve happiness, we must avoid certain behaviors and perform others.
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Happiness lay in conforming the will to the divine reason, which governs the universe.
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For an action to be moral, the kind it belongs to must not be bad, the circumstances must be appropriate, and the intention must be virtuous. The particulars of the situation have to be considered in determining what course of action should be done.
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The basis of materialism, believing that everything that happens is a result of the physical world and that the soul, as previous philosophers discussed it, does not exist.
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Actions are morally right if they tend to promote happiness or pleasure (and morally wrong if they tend to promote unhappiness or pain) among all those affected by them.
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One should always respect the humanity in others, and that one should only act in accordance with rules that could hold for everyone.
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It is a complex theoretical effort to reformulate the fundamental insights of Kantian deontological ethics in terms of the analysis of communicative structures.
