The Highest Good

Summum Bonum

This course is a prosecution of the oldest question in philosophy — what makes a life good and a wrong thing wrong — run on the student's own conviction. In the first unit he writes down the moral answer he already lives by; in the second he traces where it came from. Then he walks the great rival answers, each argued by its strongest advocate in public-domain, near-original words: Plato and Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics, Augustine and Aquinas, Kant, Bentham and Mill, and then the attackers — Hume and Nietzsche — at full strength. The religious and secular cases each get their best day in court, taught as rivals in argument and kin in subject, with the overlap mapped as carefully as the dispute.

Each lesson pairs a focused read — the concrete case first, Gyges' ring before "moral realism" — with a 20-minute applied drill: state the position so its own defender would sign it, press it with the unit's best objection, then write where you stand and why. The course tests conviction and installs none: no position is introduced by its critics or staged to lose, and a student who keeps his inherited conviction, now traced and defended, scores exactly as well as one who trades it. The capstone is the rebuild — the student's own conviction meets its strongest matched objection, and he keeps, amends, or trades it with his eyes open and his reasons in writing.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.