Ethics Book

This book is really a collection of essays on moral philosophy. What I really appreciated about this collection was that it was separated into two categories. First, into a table of contents that could be read starting from essay's from the classical and medieval eras, to the modern world, then through the contemporary area. Secondly, it is then separated into topical contents of ideas in moral philosophy; to include Consequentialist and Deontological theories, Virtue Ethics, Christian Ethics, Existential Ethics, Justice, Feminism, Moral Relativism and Absolutism, Subjectivism, and then essay's on the basis of moral obligations.
There is an important emphasis placed on the actual history of moral philosophy. This emphasis is then bridged with many contemporary authors who explain some of the historical important ideas of past greats of moral philosophy.
Perhaps one of the strong points of this collection is that it prepares you to read the essay by explaining the key concepts the reading covers, and including questions to think about while reading the selections.
The downside to this collection is that many of the readings are extremely dry and require at least a general conception, further than the key concepts, to understand the context that each essay was written within.
There is three extremely valuable essay's contained within the collection that I do want to highlight. Without these three essay's I would have given this book two stars instead of three. Those three essay's are, R.M Hares Moral Thinking , Nietzche's On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic , and Christine M. Korsgaard's Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant .
Each one of these essay's were a treasure to read and deserve to be highlighted.