Ethics: A Modern Version of Its Classic Themes

Leonardo Polo's Ethics is not a manual or textbook, but an attempt to study ethics in statu nascente, as it arises in human experience. It is Polo's intention to demonstrate that “no dimension of human action is indifferent to ethics,” that ethics is not something accidental or adventitious, one more among several competing systems of laws of human behavior, but rather something intrinsic to all human action-from its inception in the human mind through its execution to the consequences that follow long after it has been completed. Polo explores classic themes in ethics-freedom, the moral law, virtue, happiness, the will, human action, from a decidedly contemporary point of view, turning to the theory of evolution and cultural sociology for material for philosophical reflection and to physics for occasional analogies. A self-professed Aristotelian and Thomist, he surprises and even startles the reader with unexpected countercultural and counterintuitive insights on the human being.