Right and Reason: Book Review

• Title: Right and Reason: Ethics in Theory and Practice, Second Edition
• Author: Fr. Austin Fagothey, S.J.
• Published: Charlotte, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2000

About the Author[1]

Austin J. Fagothey (1901-1975) was born in San Francisco, California.  He entered the Society of Jesus after graduating from St. Ignatius High School in 1917.  He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1931.  Over his long teaching career, he taught English, Greek, theology and philosophy.  He chaired the Philosophy Department for thirty years at Santa Clara University and served on its Board of Trustees from 1943-1973.  The university awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in 1974. 

My Perspective

Right and Reason was a required book for my Morality and Justice class that I am finishing up the last week of.  Only selected chapters were required reading, but I read the book in its entirety and I am glad I did.  It is recommended in the Preface that the reader has some basic understanding of the Aristotelian-Thomistic system.  It uses the problem method.  “This consists in introducing one of the major problems of ethics, explaining how it arose and why it is a problem, giving the main schools of thought on the subject with sufficient historical background, stating the arguments for and against each proposed solution, weighing the arguments against one another, and finally resolving the problem in the light of the evidence and reasoning involved.”[2]  After each main topic there is a summary followed by a list of selected readings for further study.  I feel the book is a very good excellent overview of ethics.  One that should be read by all true conscientious citizens of the world.  I plan to keep my copy as a reference book.

One of the definitions that I found particularly useful was the definition of ethics being a study of whether our actions are something we ought to do, something we ought not to do, or something that we may either do or not in order to live a good life. There are three suppositions that Fagothey assumes and does not defend in this work.  They are the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God.  He states that, “To investigate and establish these three truths is the work of other parts of philosophy.  A brief summary of them could not do them justice, and might be more misleading than helpful.  We shall consider them as thoroughly demonstrated and adopt them as starting points for our whole study.”[3]  With that as the starting point he begins in earnest covering subjects such as the good, happiness, morality, law, conscience, virtue, family, government, property, communism and socialism, war, and peace for a total of 34 main topics.

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[1] Online Archive of California.   Guide to the Austin J. Fagothey, S.J. Papers.  Accessed May 7, 2019 https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8kp814x/

[2] Fagothey, Austin.  Right and Reason: Ethics in Theory and Practice, Second Edition.  Charlotte, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2000.  Page 5-6.

[3] Ibid., p. 27