My colleague and friend Oliver Scott Curry created the “moral philosophy cheat sheet” pictured below and posted it on his Twitter feed (@Oliver_S_Curry). Since I am in the process of reading and reviewing Ryan Patrick Hanley’s beautiful new book about Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, I thought I would re-post his cheat sheet here. Notice how “well-being” is an important criterion or dimension of most moral theories, but in the spirit of Smith and Hanley, I now wish to pose the following question to Curry: Whose well-being are talking about? The individual’s or the community’s? And if the latter, how should we define the term “community”? One’s immediate or extended family? One’s neighborhood? One’s city, province, or country? The whole world? (Also, what about the well-being of non-human animals? Where do they fit in?)
