How to Be Perfect

This is by far the most approachable book on formal ethics I've ever seen. While Schur's writing occasionally gets a little too cute, he does a really good job — I assume, not being a philosophy expert — laying out the major schools of thought and their key players and their strengths and weaknesses. Specifically, he covers virtue ethics, consequential ism, and deontology, and highlights a few related schools of thought like existentialism and contractualism and objectivism. (He doesn't like objectivism very much, which makes me think we'd get along okay.)

What I would have liked is a bit of advice on how to choose what to apply to what situations, but I guess a groundbreaking unified ethical theory might be asking a bit much.