From Achilles to Superman

A Leader’s Guide to MacIntyre’s History of Ethics

Joseph J. McInerney

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9798385226993, 9798385227006
• eBook ISBN: 9798385227013
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Decades of surveys show us that the American public has lost faith in its leaders. We don't really need survey data to know this is true. Just peruse your favorite source of media and you will see a distrust in leaders from all sides of the political spectrum. It may be the only thing that our divided country agrees about. Even the leadership education experts have lost faith in the clients they are supposed to educate. After spending billions of dollars per year on leadership education, those educators observe that leaders have never been less respected or more distrusted than they are today. How can we escape our leadership predicament? We can start with a basic insight that trust or distrust in a leader is often based on the ethics of that leader. Yet many people, including our leaders, struggle to articulate what ethics is even about, much less how it relates to leadership. This book fills that gap by describing how our story of ethics has developed over the last 2,500 years and how understanding that story will help leaders regain the trust of a public that wants and needs their leaders to be worthy of trust.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Why Should We Bother to Examine the History of Ethics?
• 2. The Beginnings of Our Ethical History
• 3. Sophistry and the Wisdom of Socrates
• 4. Plato’s Description of the Good
• 5. Politics and the Moral Psychology of Plato’s Republic
• 6. Plato’s Description of Desire and Habit in Relation to Morality
• 7. Aristotle’s Impact on Greek Ethics
• 8. Classical Ethics, Modern Contrasts, Stoics, and Epicureans
• 9. Christian Morality as the Bridge Between Ancient and Medieval Ethics
• 10. Re-Thinking Ethics in the Post-Medieval Era
• 11. The Ethics of Rights and Freedom in the Marketplace
• 12. Eighteenth-Century British Ethics
• 13. Ethics in Eighteenth-Century France
• 14. The Ethics of Immanuel Kant
• 15. Hegel, Marx, and the Historical Nature of Ethics
• 16. Nineteenth-Century Utilitarianism
• 17. Danish and German Ethics in the Nineteenth Century
• 18. Twentieth-Century Ethics and Twenty-First-Century Leadership
• Bibliography