## Metadata - Author: [[Kenan Malik]] - Full Title: The Quest for a Moral Compass - Category: #books ## Highlights - In part, the history of moral thought is the history of attempts to address the problem of reconciling fate and free will. It is a dilemma with which not just believers but atheists, too, have been forced to wrestle. ([Location 181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IW4DMMY&location=181)) - In the journey from Homer to Aristotle, the Greeks crafted what we now call ‘virtue theory’, establishing the importance of character, community, flourishing and practical wisdom as the central themes of a virtuous life. This became the dominant ethical view over the next two millennia. Not till the eighteenth century did competing ethical frameworks develop in Kantianism and utilitarianism, the first stressing the importance of duty and conscience, the second the significance of the consequences of one’s actions. On that journey from Homer to Aristotle were developed the ideas of virtue as a disposition to act according to reason; of practical wisdom as a skill that inclines one to do the right thing at the right time and to the right degree; of morality as requiring one to think not of single acts but of one’s life as a whole; and of the virtuous person as someone who can be judged only according to the needs of the community of which he is a part and to which he is subordinate. ([Location 843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IW4DMMY&location=843))