The idea that immoral behaviour can sometimes be admirable, and that moral behaviour can sometimes be less than admirable, has led several of its supporters to infer that moral considerations are not always overriding, contrary to what has been traditionally maintained. In this paper I shall challenge this inference. My purpose in doing so is to expose and acknowledge something that has been inadequately appreciated, namely, the moral aspect of nonmoral goods and evils. I hope thereby to show that, even (...) if immorality can be admirable, this poses no threat to morality. (shrink)

If morality concerns the question how to live then can it be a science? Can there be a science of how to live? Hilary Putnam who poses this question answers it thus:1 logically impossible. But, he reassures us, . In the meantime moral reasoning must engage . This is developed through in literature. If the computer takes over, of course, then . So too, he says, may science, not because redundant but because complete in its explanatory and predictive power.

This paper argues that the Cambridge Platonists had stronger philosophical links to Scottish moral philosophy than the received history allows. Building on the work of Michael Gill who has demonstrated links between ethical thought of More, Cudworth and Smith and moral sentimentalism, I outline some links between the Cambridge Platonists and Scottish thinkers in both the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century. I then discuss Hume's knowledge of Cudworth, in Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, The (...) Natural History of Religion and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. (shrink)

Contrary to the view that Francis Hutcheson attempted to expound, defend, and further develop the philosophical system described in Shaftesbury's Characteristics, some contemporaries of Hutcheson considered Hutcheson's differences from Shaftesbury to be at least as profound as the similarities. The clearest descriptions of those differences can be found in William Leechman's preface to Hutcheson's 1755 System of Moral Philosophy, and more elaborately in a review of Hutcheson's System, probably by Hugh Blair, published in the 1755 Edinburgh Review. Examining Shaftesbury's and (...) Hutcheson's moral philosophies in light of these two descriptions reveals that Shaftesbury's defense of virtue as natural to human beings, while a plausible response to Locke, clearly did not escape Hutcheson's censure of Epicurean egoism. (shrink)

Henry Sidgwick remarked in The Methods of Ethics regarding pleasure that the “distinctions of quality that Mill and others urge may … be admitted as grounds of preference, but only in so far as they can be resolved into distinctions of quantity.” Sidgwick had not believed that Mill intended that resolution and commented in his history that “it is hard to see in what sense a man who of two alternative pleasures chooses the less pleasant on the ground of its (...) superiority in quality can be affirmed to take ‘greatest’ happiness or pleasure as his standard of preference.” Though Mill's view has been discussed rather often, the state of the criticism has more or less stabilized with Sidgwick's conclusion. (shrink)