Our species, Homo Sapiens, is the being who thinks. But we are also the beings who learn, and the beings who experience a rich spectrum of affective emotional states.
This knol reviews and integrates fundamental ideas on ethics, including seminal contributions by Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, John Rawls, Lonnie Athens, James Gilligan, Suzanne Retzinger, René Girard, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. The article concludes by linking back modern secular views on ethics to ancient sources on the same ideas.