Over the years my approach to ethical decision making has been primarily guided by the thinking of H. Richard Niebuhr in his book The Responsible Self. Here’s a quick summary of his thinking. Niebuhr begins by analyzing the term ‘responsibility.’ At its core it entails the notion of response. That is, our efforts to be…

Roman philosophy after the Greeks and prior to the Christians was dominated by four schools of thought: the Stoics, the Skeptics, the Epicureans, and certain metaphysical Mystics. The Stoics got their name from the fact that they used to walk around philosophizing on the porch of the marketplace in Athens. The Greek word for porch…