Morality

MORALITY
1. The Wisdom of Life by Arthur Schopenhauer. This is the best place to start with this philosopher. An engaging, thought-provoking, short work. (And it is available on Amazon Kindle for $.99)
2. The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2 by Arthur Schopenhauer. This is his principal work. Volume 2, later written, is more readable than Volume 1, while it covers much of the same material.
3. The Basis of Morality by Arthur Schopenhauer. It’s compassion, as he convincingly shows here in this book-length essay.
4. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee (1983). The best and by far the most readable analysis of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
5. Broadway Danny Rose (DVD video) by Woody Allen (1984). This film is worth watching more than once.
6. Parsifal (DVD video) by Richard Wagner (1882). The 1993 Otto Schenk, Günther Schneider-Siemssen Metropolitan Opera production; with James Levine, Conductor; Siegfried Jerusalem, as Parsifal, Kurt Moll, as Gurnemanz; and a fabulous Waltraud Meier as Kundry.
7. A Guide to Parsifal by Richard Aldrich (1904). Published one year after the Metropolitan Opera premiered the opera in New York, the first performance of Parsifal outside of Bayreuth. A wonderful 73-page guide on the origins of Parsifal, the story of Wagner’s Parsifal, with an index of 33 musical motives. It remains in print, in paperback.
8. The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout (2005). A fine work on the conscienceless 2% of the population given to actions steered by the motive of malice.
9. “The Philosophical Basis of the Conflict Between Liberty and Statism” (2003). This is another article I wrote for LewRockwell.com on Schopenhauer, explaining his defense of liberty and freedom and shows how his nemesis Hegel and his Marxist offspring got it all wrong.
10. This essay comes from Chapter 3 in [the] book Heart in Hand (1999), “The Philosophical, Moral, and Medical Importance of Compassion,” (available here). It is a somewhat altered and shortened version of that chapter. (The entire book is downloadable on my website.)

Certainly a worthwhile quote by Robert Higgs

[S]ince love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved. — Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513

R. J. Rushdoony. He did not begin his weekly lectures on biblical law until 1966; these became The Institutes of Biblical Law in 1973.