An excessive preoccupation with oneself. In mythology, Narcissus was a beautiful young man who fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool of water.

In ethics, believers in natural law hold (a) that there is a natural order to the human world, (b) that this natural order is good, and (c) that people therefore ought not to violate that order. Natural Law views of morality are upheld by the Roman Catholic Church in its catechism (body of teaching), and in Papal Encyclicals such as 'Humanae Vitae' and 'Personae Vitae'. You can read these documents in Mr Baron’s notes on the Public area of WCS website.

In ethics, naturalism is the theory that moral values can be derived from facts about the world and human nature. The naturalist holds that is can imply ought.

According to G. E. Moore, any argument which attempts to define the good in terms of some natural, observable property of an action (eg the amount of happiness or pleasure produced). For Moore, Good is simple and indefinable. Some philosophers, most notably defenders of naturalism, have argued that Moore and others are wrong and that such arguments are not necessarily fallacious.

See: Rights

The belief that there is no value or truth. Literally, a belief in nothing (nihil). Most philosophical discussions of nihilism arise out of a consideration of Fredrich Nietzsche's remarks on nihilism, especially in The Will to Power.

A Kantian term that refers to the unknowable world as it is in itself. According to Kant, we can only know the world as it appears to us, as a phenomenon. We can never know it as it is in itself, as a noumenon. The adjectival forms of these two words are phenomenal and noumenal, respectively.