Ethics: Action, Power, and Moral Autonomy

Abstract

What is morality, and where does it come from? Ethics: Action, Power, and Moral Autonomy answers boldly: Morality cannot be understood solely as a code prescribed by nature or God. but the work of a being who must create meaning, responsibility, and value in a world that offers none ready-made. Tracing the long passage from nomos — the archaic order of fear, custom, and survival — to ethos, the freedom of a self that gives itself its own law, this book retells the birth of conscience as a profound anthropological transformation, where the inherited fog of mystery gives way to reason and obedience gives way to autonomy. Yet autonomy is not the end of the story. Drawing on Aristotle and Hegel, on existential thought and the Islamic ethics of amānah and akhlaq, it builds a vision of ethical life grounded in personality and conscience, sustained by an ontology of Love, and bound to others through justice — the "stone arch" that joins individual conscience to law, institutions, and the common good. Against the modern "invasion of things," which quietly surrenders human judgment to economic and technical machinery, this book makes an urgent case for the human being as a moral creator of the world: ethical life as an unfinished project, a workshop of human becoming in which dignity, justice, and meaning must be reclaimed again and again, toward a shared Planetary Ethos broad enough for all of humanity.