History of Ethics

The crimes committed by Germans under National Socialism would not have been possible without the existence of a web of shared ethical convictions. "Thick" terms such as "work", "people" or "community" are the nodal points of this intellectual construct. The contributions in this volume are not only concerned with the historical presentation of National Socialist normativity. Rather, they also make suggestions for the analysis of these concepts. An essential part of this effort is the examination of ethics of National Socialist-oriented (...) philosophers. (shrink)

This article challenges the individualism and neutrality of modern moral conscience. It looks to the history of the concept to excavate an older tradition that takes conscience to be social and morally responsive, while arguing that dominant contemporary justifications of conscience in terms of integrity are inadequate without reintroducing these social and moral traits. This prompts a rethinking of the nature and value of conscience: first, by demonstrating that a morally-responsive conscience is neither a contradiction in terms nor a political (...) absurdity; second, by suggesting how a morally-responsive conscience can be informed by the social world without being a mere proxy for social power or moribund tradition. (shrink)

On one view of ethical development, someone not yet virtuous can reliably progress by engaging in what meaningfully resembles virtuous conduct. However, one’s character may degrade from one’s well-intended conduct because this conduct is advanced for one’s character, which falls short of virtue. This risk of degradation casts doubt on the developmental view. I counter the doubt through one interpretation and one application of the Mengzi. In passage 2A2, invoking the image of a farmer who “helped” the crop grow by (...) pulling the sprouts, MENG Ke cautions, “do not help it grow.” I defend a novel interpretation: do not advance with a naïve negligence about your psycho-physiological constitution. I also show how to advance with realistic care by pointing out an overlooked application of a much-discussed cultivation technique illustrated in Mengzi 1A7: ethical reflection can conciliate one with one’s ongoing or past advanced action, lowering the action’s risk of degradation. (shrink)

Unlike many important leaders and historical figures, Abraham Lincoln is generally regarded as a singularly good and morally virtuous human being. Lincoln's Ethics assesses Lincoln's moral character and his many morally fraught decisions regarding slavery and the rights of African-Americans, as well as his actions and policies as commander in chief during the Civil War. Some of these decisions and policies have been the subject of considerable criticism. Lincoln undoubtedly possessed many important moral virtues, such as kindness and magnanimity, to (...) a very high degree. Despite this, there are also grounds to question the goodness of his character. Many fault him as a husband, father and son, and many claim that he was a racist. Carson explains Lincoln's virtues and assesses these criticisms. (shrink)

This is the first of lessons on the Bhagavad Gītā. The Bhagavad Gītā is a small section of the Mahābhārata, which is a dialectical experiment in moral theory. Here the characters not only assume the role of prominent ethical theories, but must also work through the ethical challenge as a matter of practice. In this module I explicate the main arguments of the Gītā, which lead us from teleological accounts of ethics (Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism) to procedural accounts (Deontology and Bhakti). (...) Bhakti is the most radically procedural of the four theories, and provides an account of right action independent of the good. To access article: (a) choose "Ethics 1" from the first drop down menu, and (b) the title of the paper in the second drop down menu---after clicking on the link (the title of this article above, or the link below). (shrink)

This remarkable book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. The book is organised into four main sections, each exploring moral philosophy by discussing the work of many influential philosophers of the (...) seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an epilogue the author discusses Kant's view of his own historicity, and of the aims of moral philosophy. In its range, in its analyses of many philosophers not discussed elsewhere, and in revealing the subtle interweaving of religious and political thought with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the evolution of Kant's ethics. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2008, given by David Wiggins, a British philosopher.

The Aristotelian Society’s Virtual Issue is a free, online publication, made publically available on the Aristotelian Society website. Each volume is theme-based, collecting together papers from the archives of the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume that address the chosen theme. This year's Virtual Issue includes a selection of papers from across the Society’s fourteen decades, each accompanied by a specially commissioned present-day response. The aim of the volume is to aid reflection (...) on how to go about doing moral and political philosophy, by bringing together papers that bear on their epistemology and methodology. In some cases this involves pieces whose declared focus is on one of those areas, as is the case with Margaret MacDonald’s 1941 essay ‘The Language of Political Theory’ and Mary Midgley’s 1974 article ‘The Neutrality of the Moral Philosopher’. In other cases the editor, Ben Colburn, selected papers whose primary focus is elsewhere, but which include some interesting epistemological or methodological reflections or implications along the way. The contributions from our present-day commentators vary similarly in how far their explicit attention is methodological. Nevertheless, there is throughout a concern on how to ‘be an honest reasoner’, to borrow a phrase from the late Dudley Knowles. (shrink)

This anthology contains excerpts from some thirty-two important seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophers. Including a substantial introduction and extensive bibliographies, the anthology facilitates the study and teaching of early modern moral philosophy in its crucial formative period. As well as well-known thinkers such as Hobbes, Hume, and Kant, there are excerpts from a wide range of philosophers never previously assembled in one text, such as Grotius, Pufendorf, Nicole, Clarke, Leibniz, Malebranche, Holbach and Paley. Originally issued as a two-volume edition in (...) 1990, the anthology is now re-issued with a new foreword by Professor Schneewind, as a one-volume anthology to serve as a companion to his highly successful history of modern ethics, The Invention of Autonomy. The anthology provides many of the sources discussed in The Invention of Autonomy and taken together the two volumes will be an invaluable resource for the teaching of the history of modern moral philosophy. (shrink)

Ross Poole displays the social content of the various conceptions of morality at work in contemporary society, and casts a strikingly fresh light on such fundamental problems as the place of reason in ethics, moral objectivity and the distinction between duty and virtue. The book provides a critical account of the moral theories of a number of major philosophers, including Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Habermas, Rawls, Gewirth and MacIntyre. It also presents a systematic critique of three of the most significant responses (...) to modernity: liberalism, nationalism and nihilism. It takes seriously the suggestion that men and women are subject to different conceptions of morality, and places the issue of gender at the centre of moral philosophy. Poole has written a valuable addition to the Ideas series. (shrink)

This book justifies its title as a ‘modern’ introduction to its subject because it raises most of the problems of ethics as this is usually treated in contemporary British Universities, and gives the reader a good idea both of the content and of the language and manner of ethical discussions in this particular university world. The author remarks on the national restriction of the book’s scope. He says: ‘The sort of philosophy to which this is an introduction is speciflcally the (...) sort of philosophy that is at present generally practised in this country’. He observes, quite justly that ‘British philosophy is for the most part so very different in style, assumption and method from most philosophy on the continent that it would be impossible to embark upon them both at once’. This admission that British philosophy is not equivalent to ‘philosophy’ sans phrase is somewhat rare, and is welcome. (shrink)

A crucial step in economic development is the depersonalization of business, which enables an enterprise to operate as a separate entity from its owners and managers. Until the emergence of a de iure depersonalization of business in the 19th century, business activities were eminently personal, with managing partners bearing unlimited liability. Roman law even restricted agency. Yet, the Roman legal system developed a form of de facto depersonalized business entity, where depersonalization was achieved by making the fulcrum of the business (...) a non-person: the slave. Although radically different from a legal perspective, this format exhibited all the distinctive features of modern corporations, thereby providing for a functional equivalent of the modern corporate form. The development of the de iure format was hindered by strong cultural, technological and institutional constraints. In contrast, slave-run businesses exhibited features that were largely compatible with these constraints and emerged along the path of least resistance to legal change. The end of slavery and the fall of the Roman Empire closed off this alternative path of legal evolution; consequently, the modern corporate form could only appear once these constraints had been overcome. (shrink)

This book tells the story of modern ethics, namely the story of a discussion which, after two centuries of truce, or warlike coexistence between more than one paradigm – that is, Scholastic of natural law doctrines, humanistic ethics as therapy of the passions and art of living, Reformed supposedly philosophy-free moral theology, casuistry as a kind of applied ethics – went through a methodological revolution that gave birth to Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s new science of natural law, leaving room for two (...) centuries of explorations of the possible developments and implications of this new paradigm, up to the crisis of the Eighties in the eighteenth century, a crisis that carried a kind of mitosis, the act of birth of both basic paradigms of the two following centuries: Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. The new science of natural law carried a fresh start for ethics, resulting from a mixture of the Old and the New. It was, as suggested by Schneewind, an attempt at rescuing the content of Scholastic and Stoic doctrines on a new methodological basis. The former was the claim of existence of objective and universal moral laws; the latter was the self-aware attempt at justifying a minimal kernel of such laws facing skeptical doubt. What Bentham and Kant did was precisely carrying this strategy further on, even if restructuring it each of them around one out of two alternative basic claims. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment attacked both not on their alleged failure in carrying out their own projects, but precisely on having adopted Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project. What counter-enlightenment has been unable to spell out is which alternative project could be carried out facing the modern condition of pluralism, while on the contrary, if we takes a closer look at developments in twentieth-century ethics or at on-going discussions on practical issues, we might feel inclined to believe that Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project is as up-to-date as ever. (shrink)

Terence Irwin presents a historical and critical study of the development of moral philosophy over two thousand years, from ancient Greece to the Reformation. Starting with the seminal ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, he guides the reader through the centuries that follow, introducing each of the thinkers he discusses with generous quotations from their works. He offers not only careful interpretation but critical evaluation of what they have to offer philosophically. This is the first of three volumes which will (...) examine the history of ethics in the Socratic tradition, up to the late 20th century. (shrink)

Moral progress and some of the conditions under which groups can make it is the focus of this paper. More specifically, I address a problem arising from the use of pluralistic criteria for determining moral progress. Pluralistic criteria can allow for judgments that moral progress has taken place where there is causally related moral regression. Indeed, an otherwise well-argued pluralistic theory put forward by Michelle Moody-Adams allows for such conflicting judgments. I argue, however, that the way in which Moody-Adams handles (...) these conflicts can be made less counterintuitive. Ultimately, I limit the types of moral progress that arise in instances of value conflict. To demonstrate the attractiveness of my revision, I apply it to the content of a symposium on moral progress built around a John Lachs essay. (shrink)

Bevir?s view that theories are prior to theorists, just in so far as they are prior to any observations which one might make and, by extension, any facts which one might invoke in support of any particular interpretative conclusions, is problematic when applied to intellectual history, for although it is in one sense true that all facts are ineluctably constituted by some or other underlying theory, it is also true that, in a vast number of important situations, all human beings (...) share the same basic theory. The most important implication of this shared stock of concepts, observations and facts, is that we shall often be able to see numerous aspects of a long?dead author?s world in much the same way as he or she saw it. (shrink)

Written by well-known professor and author Michael Boylan, Morality and Global Justice is an accessible examination of the moral and normative underpinnings of ...

Theory. Moral knowledge and moral principles -- Victorian Matters. First principles and common-sense morality in Sidgwick's ethics ; Moral problems and moral philosophy in the Victorian Period -- On the historiography of moral philosophy. Moral crisis and the history of ethics ; Modern moral philosophy : from beginning to end? : No discipline, no history : the case of moral philosophy ; Teaching the history of moral philosophy -- Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy. The divine corporation and the history of (...) ethics ; Natural law ; The misfortunes of virtue ; Voluntarism and the foundations of ethics ; Hume and the religious significance of moral rationalism -- On Kant. Why study Kant's Groundwork ; Autonomy, obligation, and virtue : an overview of Kant's moral philosophy ; Kant and Stoic ethics ; Toward enlightenment : Kant and the sources of darkness ; Kantian unsocial sociability : good out of evil -- Moral psychology. The active powers -- Afterword. Sixty years of philosophy in a life. (shrink)

... and customs prevail in Japan. In my attempts to give satisfactory replies to M. de Laveleye and to my wife, I found that without understanding feudalism ...

The Continental Ethics Reader is the first comprehensive anthology of classic writings on ethics and moral philosophy from the major figures in Continental thought. The carefully selected readings are divided into five sections: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, Existentialism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. All of the authors and their writings are introduced and placed in philosophical context by the editors. The Continental Ethics Reader is an ideal point of entry to the most pressing issues and most important thinkers of the (...) Continental tradition, and provides a thorough and much needed introduction to the field. (shrink)

This examination of a fundamental but often neglected aspect of the intellectual history of early modern Europe brings together philosophers, historians and political theorists from Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, France and Germany. Despite the diversity of disciplines and national traditions represented, the individual contributions show a remarkable convergence around three themes: changes in the modes of moral education in early modern Europe, the emergence of new relations between conscience and law (particularly the law of the state), and (...) the shared continuities and discontinuities of both Roman Catholic and Protestant moral culture in relation to their medieval past. (shrink)

In Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot discusses the understanding of philosophy held by the Greco-Roman ancients. Philosophy was not understood only as an exegetical or analytical exercise, but as a spiritual practice - a way of life. Becoming a member of a philosophical school was tantamount to a religious conversion involving one's entire self. To make one's doctrines 'ready to hand' required a number of 'spiritual exercises' which, if regularly followed, were intended to evince such a transformation. (...) Hadot discusses the role of such exercises for (among others) Platonists, Epicureans, Christians, and Stoics. I propose that the Samurai should be added to such a consideration. Their respective exercises allowed the adherents genuinely to adopt their system of beliefs. Many beliefs held by Stoics and Samurai are surprisingly similar. After having discussed some of these similarities, the most striking similarity will be revealed: the role of spiritual exercises in preparing both the Stoic and the Samurai for death. (shrink)

This book brings together the lectures that inspired a generation of students--and a regeneration of moral philosophy.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provide the tools to teach the history of modern moral philosophy. What makes this selection distinctive is that it covers not only the familiar figures - Hobbes, Hume, Butler, Bentham and Kant - but also the important but generally ignored writers: new translations of Nicole, Wolff, Crusius and d'Holbach; as well as substantial excerpts from natural law theorists such as Suarez, Grotius and Pufendorf; from rationalists such as Malebranche, Cudworth, Spinoza and Leibniz; from Epicurean writers (...) such as Gassendi; and from their 'moral sense' and other critics: Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Price. In all, thirty-two authors are represented. The selections are preceded by a substantial contextual introduction, while each individual selection has a separate introduction, annotation and bibliography, and has been chosen for its centrality to a given philosopher's writings. The anthology can be used as an introductory survey or for more intensive graduate work as well. It can also be used as supplemental reading for courses on modern European intellectual history, the history of modern political thought, and the history of religious thought. (shrink)

In Greek mythology the Muses –patron goddesses of fine arts, history, humanities, and sciences– are tellingly portrayed as the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess Memory, who is of the race of Titans, older still than Zeus and other Olympian deities. The relationship between memory and such fields as epic poetry, history, music and dance is easily recognizable to moderns. But bards/poets like Homer and Hesiod, who began oral storytelling by “invoking the Muses” with their audience, knew well that (...) remembering, forgetting, and imagining are each to be esteemed as, in Hesiod’s words, “gifts of the goddesses.” The economy of memory is an important concern for moral psychology, philosophy of emotions, and philosophy of imagination. This chapter examines ways that amusements, both classically and today, can function to educate moral emotions in and though their multi-faceted engagements with the economy of memory. (shrink)

Many values originating in Africa and in China, and ones that continue to influence much of everyday communication in those societies, are aptly placed under the common heading of 'harmony'. After first spelling out what harmony involves in substantially Confucian China, and then in Africa, this article notes respects in which the Confucian and African conceptions of harmony are similar, an awareness of which could facilitate smooth communication. The article then indicates respects in which the Confucian and African conceptions of (...) harmony are different, a lack of awareness of which could undermine smooth communication The point of the article is to facilitate Sino-African communication by means of an awareness of indigenous moral-philosophical mindsets that continue to be salient in China and Africa, despite the influence of the West. (shrink)

The Department of Higher Education of the Government of India has created the e-PG Pathshala Program: an e-Graduate School initiative, consisting of free, online resources (essay-lectures, video lectures, and PowerPoint notes) for Master’s level education. Each course consists of about 30 to 40 lessons. Ethics-1 is the first year MA course in Ethics. All contributions were peer reviewed. This is the first historical survey of moral theory that spans the European and Asian traditions, and gives equal prominence to contributions from (...) Europe and India. Much of the material and research published here was previously unavailable in other forms. (Title of this entry linked to Ethics-1.) From the first drop down menu, select "Ethics 1." From the second, select the module. (shrink)

This module is a review of the guiding ideas of Lao Tzu’s ethics of wu wei and the Tao, an account of Lao Tzu’s prioritisation of the feminine as a basic moral principle, the problem of masculinity for practical rationality, his criticism of language, doctrines and oppressive politics. Finally, we shall evaluate the moral import of Lao Tzu’s teachings, and close with some reflections on the synergy between Taoist and Madhyamaka Buddhist thought, which rendered the latter so easily received in (...) Asia. (shrink)

Confucius, being one of the earliest of Chinese philosophers that we know of, seems uniquely responsible for setting the tone of Chinese philosophy. His focus on ethical questions of the Way no doubt serves as a reminder of the type of perennial questions that philosophers should answer. In this module, I outline the main concepts of the Analects, followed by an elaboration on the central Confucian ethical doctrines: The doctrine of the Mean, Filial Piety, Patriarchal Hierarchy and the Golden Rule. (...) This is followed by a discussion of the Analects’ comments on politics, and finally, a discussion of the underlying metaethics or moral semantics of Confucius's ethics: The Rectification of Names. Confucius's ethics constitutes a uniquely Asian source of Humanism, and while similar to the ethics of Aristotle, provides a distinctive account of moral theory and Virtue Ethics. (shrink)