Ethics – The Good We Already Do

Whoever puts a judgement before another owes them reasons – you already know this before any ethics tells you.

A mechanic says: “You should have the brake pads changed.” With “Trust me” he demands that you adopt his judgement because it is his; if he takes you to the jacked-up wheel and shows you the pad, you can judge for yourself. This book makes explicit what is already acknowledged in this, and follows it step by step: from the checking the reader is performing right now into action, from action between two people into the institutions in which many live together, and finally to the question of how to weigh where good stands against good. It appeals to no great name; every step is meant to be checkable against one’s own judging and acting.

The examples come from everyday life: the car that is supposed to fit into the garage, the greeting on the narrow road, the caller who claims to be from your bank, the deer in the headlights. Seventeen experiments invite you to look in yourself and see whether what is written there is right.

Structure

Part I: What we already do – Whoever checks takes the matter as the measure, not themselves; the other who answers is not a measuring device; whoever puts a judgement before them owes them reasons that they can check, and may neither lie to them nor steer them.

Part II: Acting with others – Ends and means, the opponent, justification before those affected, the will of the other and not only their welfare, mistakes, guilt and forgiveness, what one owes oneself, and what it means to act against one’s better knowledge.

Part III: What is shared – Friendship, rules and institutions, the common good, tested by those who can least evade, and what holds between states over which no judge stands.

Part IV: Dealing with standards – Weighing without a fixed ranking; what we owe to animals and who besides human beings has knowledge, up to and including AI.

Each chapter ends with a summary in italics; anyone who wants to see the course of the argument first can read only these.

What is special

Each step arises from what is still missing in the previous one. The appendices, which the main part does not need, present the great ethical theories from Aristotle and Kant to discourse ethics and the dialogics of Johannes Heinrichs in their strongest form, together with their objections to this book, and show the relation to Hegel’s system. Eleven well-known test cases, from the trolley problem to the experience machine, test whether the book’s means hold.

Relation to the other books

This book is the third of the three foundational books. Truth and Thinking – Ordering Without Losing belong to knowing, this one to willing. It finds the ground of obligation in the checking that Truth unfolds; but what it needs from the other two it develops itself, with examples of its own. Each of the three can be read on its own and in any order.

Bibliography

Year

2026

Edition

Kai Froeb Edition

Licence

Zero Marginal Cost License v1.3

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