> recommendations for entry level philosophy/ethics books Nice (but opinionated and now ~50y old) overview: Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy".

> recommendations for entry level philosophy/ethics books Nice (but opinionated and now ~50y old) overview: Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy". Long but extremely readable. Not necessarily very reliable. Ethics specifically: Peter Singer's "Practical ethics". Note that Singer thinks that we (in the affluent West) should all be giving a lot more than most of us do to help less well-off people, and that non-human animals' welfare is much more important than most people treat it as, and he's quite persuasive. So reading his work might be bad for your financial and/or gastronomic well-being (but if so, you will consider that that's for the best). Not all that entry-level but full of clever things and exceptionally clear (in approximately the way that maths/physics/computing people value clear thinking extra-highly): Gary Drescher's "Good and Real". Subtitle is "demystifying paradoxes from physics to ethics". Just for fun: Quine's "Quiddities: an intermittently philosophical dictionary". Not really a dictionary, but a collection of short essays and remarks in alphabetical order of (single-word) subject. Quine was an absolutely first-rank philosopher, though he's not in particularly serious mode here. Not at all entry-level (in terms of how hard you need to think; I don't think much expert philosophical knowledge is needed) but extraordinarily good and highly relevant to questions of ethics, though it's more about questions of personal identity: Derek Parfit's "Reasons and persons". He's more recently written a large two-volume work on ethics, which I haven't read.