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Today, we read from “The Philosophy of Civilization and Ethics” by the Reverend Dr. Albert Schweitzer (vegetarian). This work addresses the challenges of understanding morality and emphasizes the importance of reflection on ethics to raise moral awareness and contribute to the betterment of society. Chapter 3 The Ethical Problem [How to Find the Right Moral Principle] “If any age lacks the minds which force it to reflect about the ethical, the level of its morality sinks, and with it its capacity for answering the questions which present themselves. In the history of ethical thought we wander in the innermost circles of world-history. Of all the forces which mold reality, morality is the first and foremost. It is the determining knowledge which we must wring from thought. Everything else is more or less secondary. […]All those who in any way help forward our thought about ethics are working for the coming of peace and prosperity in the world. They are engaged in the higher politics, and the higher national economics, and even if all they can do is nothing more than to bring ethical thinking to the fore, they have nevertheless done something valuable. All reflection about ethics has as one result a raising and rousing of the general disposition to morality. […]‘To preach morality is easy, to give it a foundation is hard,’ says Schopenhauer, and that saying shows the nature of the problem. In every effort of thought about ethics there is to be seen, distinctly or indistinctly, the search for a basic principle of morality, which needs no support outside itself, and unites in itself the sum total of all moral demands. […] The ethical problem, then, is the problem of a basic principle of morality founded in thought. What is the common element of good in the manifold things which we feel to be good? Is there such a universally valid conception of the good? If there is, in what does it consist, and how far is it real and necessary for me? What influence has it over my general disposition and my actions? Into what relations with the world does it bring me? It is, then, on the basic principle of the moral that the attention of thought has to be fixed. The mere giving of a list of virtues and duties is like striking notes at random on the piano and thinking it is music. And when we come to discuss the works of earlier moralists, it is only the elements in them which can help the establishment of an ethical system that will interest us, not the way in which any system has been advocated.”
