Ethics in a Cocoon: How (Not) to Live Well Together

Front Cover
AuthorHouse, 2007 - 496 pages
Cocoon demonstrates, in easy-to-understand language, that ethics is about trust, and happiness. Trust is the essential ingredient to mutally-supportive and durable relationships, focused on reducing life's imperfections. Such relationships are the key to happiness. But we cannot live deep inside protective cocoons and still build trust and relationships. Instead, we must develop all the dimensions of what makes us human--intellectual (truth), spiritual (unity), moral (goodness), and aesthetic (beauty). Above all, we have to know ourselves, and be able to pass the "mirror test" every day. Our most important relationship, after all, being with ourself, and we don't discover our spiritual unity without a Personal Strategic Plan. Nor can we become ethically fit without enthusiasm, equanimity and a commitment to excellence--traits not found in cocoons. Only ethical fitness can help us find the resolution to the fundamental ethical dilemmas we all face--truth versus loyalty, short-term versus long-term, individual versus community, and justice versus mercy. This book suggests we use a variety of lenses to look at the world today--power, wealth, prestige, status. We use the lenses of economics, politics, and technology. We do not use nearly enough the lens of ethics--relationships, happiness, decency, and the golden mean. Once we're ethically fit--the result of continuous practice--we're able to recognize ethical dilemmas, approach them skillfully, and resolve them successfully. This book shows the way to such fitness, which is useful in any context or relationship, personal, local or global. Cocoon is a self-improvement book of the first order, with real-life macro-illustrations of the ethical dilemmas we face in a complex and crowded world in which too many of us pursue the dictates of false gods. It includes over 500 practice questions, and was developed as a textbook in the ethics courses the author taught to seniors at Ramapo College from 2002 th

From inside the book

Contents

Concepts for Ethical Fitness
27
GDP 19502004
48
King John Act 4 Scene 2 William Shakespeare 26
49
3P Model of Happiness
56
What a Wonderful World Louis Armstrong
58
Ethics Is about Relationships
66
The Island of Truth Sir Francis Bacon
75
Not Ready to Make Nice Dixie Chicks
85
Corporations 2005
198
Ghost of Tom Joad Bruce Springsteen
199
Follow Your Bliss Joseph Campbell
212
The Four Inseparable Es of Ethics
216
The Reasons for Enthusiasms Importance
223
Passions and History Eugen RosenstockHuessy
225
Quick Review Inseparables Mediocrity Lowest Common Denominator
227
Living on 18000
237

Know Thyself Notes on Delphi
94
Relationships Are about Trust
100
The Hour of Living Rightly Horace
111
Whats Needed for Ethical Fitness Kidder
112
The Golden Mean Horace
117
The Four Major Ethical Dilemma Paradigms
123
Golden Straitjacket Thomas L Friedman
134
Entitlements as a Percent of GDP
136
Pernicious Drift Alan Greenspan
142
ShortTerm Versus LongTerm Real Growth The Cost of Growth Naiveté
148
The Trite Subjects Albert Einstein
157
Ode to a Grecian Urn John Keats
159
Imagine John Lennon
183
Household Wealth 1995 and 2005 by Quartile
185
Food Security 1999 2004
191
Coriolanus Excerpt William Shakespeare
245
Social Harmony Tom Morris
259
A Road Less Traveled Robert Frost
274
Amid the Blur V David Schwantes
287
The Wheel of Life Crusades Blur Values Trustworthiness SelfProtection Loyalty
288
Musée des Beaux Arts W H Auden
304
Got Flowers Today Allen Dowdell
329
Platos Cave Dwellers Tom Morris
343
Practice Questions 516
353
Conclusion 19
371
U S Economic and Population Data 8
392
U S Workforce Data 9
403
World Population and Economic Data 18
427
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