Books About Ethics and Hard Moral Choices

Michael Frayn's play returns to the wartime meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, questioning what each man understood about the other's intentions. The competing accounts make culpability hard to assign with confidence. Read it for the way a relationship changes under obligations its members struggle to share.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt sends a wealthy woman back to her struggling hometown with a fortune to offer and a terrible condition attached. The setup gives an entire town time to find respectable language for a bargain it would like to make. Choose this play for the uneasy laughter of recognizing how a community can talk itself into a decision.

Kwame Anthony Appiah uses cases including the decline of dueling to examine how a once-respectable practice can come to look disgraceful. The distinction between an argument people know and a social expectation they live by makes the history valuable. It gives you a way to ask what helped a change in moral judgment become a change in conduct.