A Short History of Ethics

Alasdair MacIntyre, 1998, A Short History of Ethics: A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric Age to the twentieth century, London and New York: Routledge Calssics, 2nd ed.

It will be difficult to understand bioethics if one does not have any idea about the development of ethics. Bioethics is a new branch of ethics, barely thirty years old. It is also known as applied ethics to differentiate it from the theological ethics. In this book, which is highly recommended, MacIntyre has managed to condense the often dense history of ethics into one small volume (only 264 pages).