He believed that humans have an intrinsic core or essence that distinguishes them from other animals.

He said that many of the traditional moral systems are created and sustained by the powerful and dominant to keep the masses in order

He believed the Church preached quietism—acceptance of its teaching and abandonment of personal ambition.

He looks to the cultural history of morals to see why in the past such conduct has been sanctioned or endorsed.

The term existentialist emerged from the slogan that essence precedes existence, meaning that when we remove all preconceptions about what it is to be human.

He said that determining the rightness and wrongness of acts is the "why" we

choose to do as we do, that is, our motive.

He believes we should be constantly reflective

about our acts, and we should be authentic.

In his thought, we invent ourselves despite whatever world we find ourselves thrown into.

His ideas are most powerful when showing that we often live mindlessly—we constantly follow one path and then delude ourselves about what we did.

His moral philosophy is perhaps best explained as a dramatic presentation

of the philosophical idea of intersubjectivity.

He said that we only come to understand our existence in relation to the external world—we know that we are separate only because we have something to say we

are separate from.

He said that relationships can be understood as I-It and I-Thou.

"I - It" is a recognition of a relationship with an entity that resonates with us.

"I - Thou" relationship is the recognition that the other is an object.

He said thatevery time we try to pin down what it is to be a person, we will inevitably fail.

He said that we start with people in relationships, and only then can we

determine what it is to be a fully realized person.

He said that we can choose to treat things and people as objects, or we can open ourselves up to authentic engagement with them.

Only when people started to form communities—which foster internal competition and external aggression, leading to systematic domination and oppression accounting for the emergence of vanity, deference, esteem, or contempt

He believes that education should concentrate not on conforming

the child to social expectations but on actualizing the child’s inner potential.

Utilitarianism holds that the rightness or wrongness of actions is determined

by the intentions placed by the person acting.

Utilitarianism is less concerned

with consequences but looks instead to the personal character of the

decisions we make.

The "utility" is a measure of the total satisfaction received

by consuming a good or service.

His basic formulation is that the measure of right and wrong is discovered

by assessing the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

He felt that we had to include several factors—intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent—when examining

total happiness.

He believes that we should look to the total amount of human happiness generated by any human project, that we all count equally, and that our choices are equally valid

He was an ardent believer in the power of education to improve one’s appreciation and enjoyment of life.

He suggests that some are qualitatively better and we can appreciate them despite the frustrations we might encounter.

When faced with a choice, they consider the particular situation to determine what individual act would maximize happiness.

They generate rules or derive guidelines from the greatest happiness principle that look beyond the immediate case and bring in other considerations.

He took utilitarianism in a

different direction by arguing that people strive for multiple goals.

He said that if we are all seeking overall happiness, then our own actions are the means to something else—let us call it the "summum bonum", a Latin phrase meaning the best good.

He believed that the concept of the good is a “simple, indefinable, unanalysable object of thought".

He realized that because we have limited knowledge, time, and resources to make decisions, sometimes achieving the best available outcome may be better than the best possible one.

He believes that ethics has to begin with the belief that we cannot favor ourselves and that our interests are inevitably intertwined with those of others.

He says that if we can benefit others greatly at little cost to ourselves, then that is what we should do.

He believes that we must take into account how our actions will touch everyone potentially affected by them for better or worse.

According to him, we recognize the cognitive and other limitations that humans have, and at the same time, it releases us from the demand to completely maximize the good and tells us that we can find an answer that is both sufficient and satisfying.

According to him, the concept of good is not simply defined through

linguistic synonyms, but he nevertheless thought we know it when we come across it

He looks to a standard of what will be most useful to society, not to what each person would allow.