In this approachable guide, Stanford University ethics lecturer Liautaud empathizes with people striving to apply ethical reasoning in contemporary society. She walks readers through a framework designed to evaluate situations and get through the confounding clutter of grey areas and misinformation ... Throughout, Liautaud emphasizes that individual choices do matter, and urges readers to take responsibility for their actions and hold public officials and personalities responsible for theirs. Her final message is that ethics are a crucial component of our humanity, and that we all should take action, raise our voice, and take a stand. Readers will appreciate her logical guidance.
It might be hard, at the present moment, to read the title of Susan Liautaud’s The Power of Ethics without snickering or rolling one’s eyes ... Talking about 'the power of ethics' at this moment feels rather like talking about “the power of warmth” in the middle of a raging blizzard while wearing wet socks. The book’s title, at any rate, is misleading. The Power of Ethics is more focused on the demands of ethics than on its alleged powers; its main intention is to help its readers make better ethical decisions ... Interesting questions, however, do not guarantee satisfying answers, and Liautaud’s recommendations about how to resolve them are frequently frustrating and often vague ... Some parts of the framework, moreover, are quite problematic ... A bolder, more searching book would have encouraged its American readers to step away from themselves and think, objectively and self-critically, about their position in the world, how they have achieved it, and what it takes to maintain it. Its failure to seize this opportunity renders The Power of Ethics far less powerful than it might, and ought, to have been.
Liautaud, who runs her own consulting company and teaches ethics at Stanford, proves that it’s possible to write a book about ethics without deploying the words virtue or utilitarian or the names Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Bentham, or Mill. Readers accustomed to historically grounded philosophical works of broad abstraction or technical argumentation will find this text less demanding. In one sense, the book is philosophy for the digital age ... The author sometimes reduces difficult philosophical questions to a series of bullet points that would fit nicely in a corporate PowerPoint presentation ... Despite shortcomings, the simple-to-understand narrative encourages deliberate reflection, an ethical act in its own right.
