Moral Philosophy: Ethics from Socrates to Sex

Plato - The Republic (390 BC)
Selections from The Republic cover Socrates views on a form of censorship, especially in terms of what is allowed to children. That of fiction written and that of the poets should be censored to protect the "nature of gods and heroes." Mainly so that false representations are not made and so that the young are not exposed and desensitized to the evils that may appear in such stories. Since most all will learn virtuous lessons from the great storytellers, censorship is needed to ensure that the mind of the audience is modeled to be virtuous. The Republic was perhaps Plato's most epic endeavor, and became widely criticized as the basis for totalitarianism.

Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics (350 BC)
To be good is to perform virtuous activity and Aristotle wrote that the good is what we strive for in itself as the end of our actions. In Nicomachean Ethics there are two kinds of virtue: the moral virtue and the intellectual virtue; moral being that which is learned from a parental figure and the latter being that which is learned from a teacher. Both virtues are the result of trained habits, this being the only way they are achieved and not as being innate attributes of a person. The mode of each action that is virtuous has an excess and a deficiency, thus to be good one must find the mean between the two.

St. Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica (1265)
For Aquinas people by nature want to be good and act in such a way. Actions are derived from a natural law, which is an interaction of what people have a natural inclination towards, that of an eternal law. These laws are all based on the notion that all beings want good as their ends and will avoid evil. The natural inclination towards good is according to reason and assumes that all beings want to sustain life in a natural order. This is the basis of the laws in which people live by, yet Aquinas still wrote that the closer we pay attention to detail in actions, exceptions will be found.