Taking its lead from Socrates, philosophical ethics is not content to accept this as an answer to the question of how we should live. We said earlier that each one of us answers ethical questions every day by how we choose to live our lives. For many people, this choice is made implicitly by conforming to the ethos and customs of their culture. Philosophical ethics denies that simple conformity and obedience are the best guides to how we should live. From the very beginning, philosophy rejects authority as the source of ethics and has, instead, defended the use of reason as the foundation of ethics. Philosophical ethics seeks a reasoned analysis of custom and a reasoned defense of how we ought to live.