Ethics and the Full-Breasted Richness of Life: A Roycean Approach to Nourishing the Good Life

American philosophers around the turn of the twentieth century offer a treasure of principles that can usefully guide us to a fuller life. In a personal letter to philosopher Josiah Royce, the pragmatic philosopher Charles Pierce admitted that while his logic provided security by avoiding error, it lacked the quality of "uberty," or being life-giving. Royce developed a view that would lead us to practice the good of harmony over chaotic disharmony. An important neglected gem in our undertaking of an ethical life is the importance of loyalty to a cause which goes beyond our narrow egos. Understanding this and reaching for a higher reference point of having "loyalty to loyalties," respecting the diversity of causes that people have, offers a working solution for the many thorny moral problems which have polarized society. Read this book if you want to learn how to make choices for the good in varied aspects of your lives, from friendship to business dealings. The end goal, which this portrayal of ethics elaborate, is to obtain personhood, which enables you to live a fuller life and to enable others to do the same.

Richard P. Mullin earned his PhD, in philosophy and taught philosophy at Wheeling Jesuit University for thirty years. He also taught Business Ethics in the MBA program. He has lectured in American philosophy in Slovenia and Slovakia and frequently read papers at the meetings of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. In The Soul of Classical American Philosophy: The Ethical and Spiritual Insights of William James, Josiah Royce, and Charles Sanders Pierce (SUNY Press2007), he portrays the governing ideas of the founders of American Pragmatism.