Natasha Bee's Key Ideas from Introducing Ethics
by Dave Robinson

Children's education is so important. Rousseau's view on ethics is that we are born as moral beings with a huge potential for goodness, but we get corrupted with artificial needs. Things like needing ipods and phones create vices that impact our innate goodness and innocence...

Morality is not just a form of instinctive behaviour. How much of it is genetic and how much of it is a result of nurture?

Nature provides evidence of co-operation amongst animals and plants, which is how “ecosystems” come into being in the first place.

Animals behaviour can often appear to be “moral” when viewed from the outside, but they live in a non-conscious, non-symbolic world of instinct. We differ from animals by doing what we do consciously. Human beings are able to choose and take responsibility for the decisions that they make. If human beings are “selfish” then they are so in an oddly co-operative way, otherwise there wouldn’t be families, tribes and societies.