Philosophical Dictionary

Let's discuss Thomas Aquinas's just war theory. How can you tell if warfare is just? Can warfare be just by its nature?

We share the difference between modern ethical theories and the virtue ethics system posed by the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, explaining how virtue ethics offers us more than explanations of what is good or bad.

Watch a lion eat a deer in a lion documentary and you cheer; watch it in a deer documentary and you look away. Nietzsche built a whole theory of morality on that switch, with lambs, birds of prey, debts and priests. Was he really on the lion’s side, or is the story more complicated than the meme lets on?

Is the dog a good boy? Depends on your ethical theory, says the meme. Nietzsche went further in 1873: truth itself is a mobile army of metaphors, and being truthful means lying by convention. He never published the essay, and his famous “no facts” line sits in a notebook. So did he hand us post-truth?

“Without objective morality, everything is permissible” sounds like a knockout argument, and a sandwich meme made it a joke. The sentence is usually pinned on Dostoevsky, Sartre built existentialism on it, and Nietzsche thought atheists who kept their morals were cheating. Does objective morality need God at all?