The most recommended books about personal values in ethics

Our nation’s most insightful—and readable—sociologist? Boston College’s Juliet Schorr has my vote.

Over the past quarter-century, Schor has probably done more than anyone else in the world to bring grand conceptual constructs like income distribution down to the nitty-gritty of daily life.

Her 1999  best-seller, The Overspent American, strikingly exposes how inequality unleashes a “competitive consumption” dynamic that has us consuming ever more and enjoying life ever less. And that dynamic poses more dangers today than ever before.

As Schor put it in an interview with her I did some years back, we have “no chance” at achieving ecological sustainability “with the kind of extreme income distribution” that we have today. 

Most commentators see neoliberalism as primarily an economic project that tries to overcome old cultural prejudices and divisions. Cooper shows us that beneath this cosmopolitan façade, neoliberalism has always been about reinforcing traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality. Through a painstaking review of the actual roll-out of neoliberal policy from Reagan to Obama, she shows that racism, sexism, homophobia, and nationalism are not outdated “leftovers” from a previous era but an essential part of the neoliberal order.

This collection revolves around the for-some-liberating-and-for-others-distressing idea that, given the plurality of things that matter in life, the options one faces might sometimes not be rankable in relation to one another as either one better than the other or as equally good; instead, they might be incomparable or else on a par.

While some think this idea requires qualification or is mistaken, others accept it and ask if or when it raises a serious challenge for choosing well. In a world rich with diverse possibilities that one can find oneself torn between, it’s natural to wonder whether rational choice between options that cannot be ranked in relation to one another is possible and, if so, how such choice proceeds.

This collection provides an influential starting point for such inquiry.  

Featured prominently in the plot of the NBC comedy The Good Place, Scanlon’s 1998 book covers much more than reasons and metaethics – it offers an ambitious explanatory theory of where our moral obligations to one another come from, and why they have the particular shape that they do – including of why we can’t justify doing terrible things to someone just because it benefits many other people. But in the first two chapters of the book, Scanlon also offers a large range of important and influential arguments about the nature of reasons and their relationship to both desire and value, and those two chapters in their own right merit this book a place on this list, in addition to its many other virtues.

This is a fabulous book about self-love and self-acceptance. Zero does not think she counts like all the other numbers. She sees herself as empty inside. Over the course of the book, we watch zero’s self-discovery and self-acceptance. It is beautifully written and an important book about not trying to change yourself in order to fit in. I wish I had this book when I was a kid.

This is an original view of the Enlightenment by one of the most exciting of its current historians. The Enlightenment urged people to think for themselves; intellectual authority resided ultimately within the individual. It valued the emotions as highly as reason; emotions included what philosophers called ‘the passions’, not just sympathy with others, but individual desires and appetites. The Enlightenment was also a period of increasing material prosperity, in which some thinkers still praised the virtue of frugality, while others pointed out that luxury and self-indulgence were necessary to drive the modern economy. These arguments, displayed here with energy and clarity, are with us still.

Barbara Coombs Lee is a nurse, lawyer, and leader of the movement to promote assisted death in the United States and around the world for people with terminal illnesses. Lee is a patient advocate at heart, a position she embodied given her work as a nurse. In this book, she provides a humane, eye witness view of what she saw as a nurse that inspired her to spark a movement that strives to give patients control over their bodies and medical decisions.

Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was first published when I was a teenager. I was aware of the book’s unforeseen popularity and countercultural reputation, but it proved too daunting for me at the time. I read it years later, after I had read Blue Highways, and was immediately enthralled with the road trip dimension of the book (Pirsig travels from Minneapolis to San Francisco on his motorcycle, accompanied by his son and some friends—not on the same motorcycle, of course). It’s a compelling journey across the austerely beautiful northern tier of the American West; it’s also a darker journey into the narrator’s troubled past. Much of the book is given to philosophical inquiry—an intellectual trip that’s just as compelling as the physical journey.

At a time when businesses are targeting net zero carbon emissions, Net Positive is a rallying cry for leaders to embrace a wider definition of sustainability.

As Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, who I’ve had the privilege of interviewing, and Andrew Winston explain net positive companies improve the lives of everyone they touch, increasing long-term shareholder returns in the process; take ownership of social and environmental impacts their business models create, viewing these as opportunities to innovate; and partner with competitors, civil society and governments to drive transformative change. 

Although some concepts presented in this book were not new to me, the authors’ examples add meaningful perspective. Net Positive affirmed my belief in purpose-led organizations and the power of business to do more.

The concept of the ‘good ancestor,’ originally coined by physician Jonas Salk, is the focus of Roman Krznaric’s excellent book about our relationship with future generations.

I’ve known Roman for a few years now: he spoke about long-term time on a panel I organised at the Hay Festival a few years ago, and he makes an appearance in my own book on a trip we both made to the House of Lords to watch a debate about future generation policy.

He is a crystal clear thinker and communicator, and I’ve learnt a lot from him. One of the most interesting (of many) ideas in his book is the idea that we are “colonising” the future: treating it as some distant no-man’s land where we can dump environmental degradation, malignant heirlooms, carbon emissions, and so on.

Of course, the future belongs to the people living there: our grandchildren. Roman makes a… show more.