In my contribution to this volume, I (BHS) comment on on the stultifying rhetoric of contemporary analytic moral theory as illustrated in Judith Jarvis Thomson's Tanner Lectures, with particular reference to Thomson's anxieties about the moral relativism exhibited by college freshman and to her efforts--quite strained, in my view, and inevitably unsuccessful--to demonstrate the existence of objective judgments in matters of morality and taste .

The sixteen essays in this volume confront the current debate about the relationship between philosophy and its history. On the one hand intellectual historians commonly accuse philosophers of writing bad - anachronistic - history of philosophy, and on the other, philosophers have accused intellectual historians of writing bad - antiquarian - history of philosophy. The essays here address this controversy and ask what purpose the history of philosophy should serve. Part I contains more purely theoretical and methodological discussion, of such (...) questions as whether there are 'timeless' philosophical problems, whether the issues of one epoch are commensurable with those of another, and what style is appropriate to the historiography of the subject. The essays in Part II consider a number of case-histories. They present important revisionist scholarship and original contributions on topics drawn from ancient, early modern and more recent philosophy. All the essays have been specially commissioned, and the contributors include many of the leading figures in the field. The volume as a whole will be of vital interest to everyone concerned with the study of philosophy and of its history. (shrink)

Henry Sedgewick's The Methods of Ethics challenges comparison, as no other work in moral philosophy, with Aristotle's Ethics in the depth of its understanding of practical rationality, and in its architectural coherence it rivals the work of Kant. In this historical, rather than critical study, Professor Schneewind shows how Sidgewick's arguments and conclusions represent rational developments of the work of Sidgewick's predecessors, and brings out the nature and structure of the reasoning underlying his position.

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)

This volume contains four versions of the lecture notes taken by Kant's students of his university courses in ethics given regularly over a period of some thirty years. The notes are very complete and expound not only Kant's views on ethics but many of his opinions on life and human nature. Much of this material has never before been translated into English. As with other volumes in the series, there are copious linguistic and explanatory notes and a glossary of key (...) terms. (shrink)

In the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant presented a method for discovering what morality requires us to do in any situation and claimed that it is a method everyone can use. The method consists in testing one's maxim against the requirement stated in the formulations of the categorical imperative. There has been endless discussion of the adequacy of Kant's method in giving moral guidance, but there has been little effort to situate Kant's view of ethical method in its (...) historical context. In this paper I try to do so. I take the label "method of ethics" from the work of Henry Sidgwick. A method of ethics, he says, is any rational procedure by which we determine what it is right for an individual to do or what an individual ought to do. Since the moralists I want to consider do not all think of morality as rational, I shall broaden the notion by saying that a method is any systematic or regular procedure, rational or not, by which we determine what morality requires... (shrink)

In the paper I offer a brief sketch of one of the sources of utilitarianism. Our biological ancestry is a matter of fact that is not altered by the way we describe ourselves. With philosophical theories it is otherwise. Utilitarianism can be described in ways that make it look as if it is as old as moral philosophy – as J. S. Mill thought it was. For my historical purposes, it is more useful to have an account that brings out (...) what is specific about Benthamism and its descendants. Let us try to make do with the following. First, utilitarianism asserts that the fundamental requirement of morality is that we are to maximize good, for everyone and not just for the agent. This basic principle presupposes that it makes sense to think of aggregating goods to make a total, and of comparing amounts of good thus aggregated. Second, the good to be brought about is located in feelings of pleasure, and the evil to be avoided in feelings of pain. These feelings have inherent value or disvalue regardless of how they are caused to exist and regardless of their own consequences. Third, all moral principles can be derived from the requirement that good be maximized. The principles involved in evaluating agents as well as in giving moral direction to action are nothing but applications of the basic principle. (shrink)

This volume contains four versions of the lecture notes taken by Kant's students of his university courses in ethics given regularly over a period of some thirty years. The notes are very complete and expound not only Kant's views on ethics but many of his opinions on life and human nature. Much of this material has never before been translated into English. As with other volumes in the series, there are copious linguistic and explanatory notes and a glossary of key (...) terms. (shrink)

A splendid edition. Schneewind's illuminating introduction succinctly situates the _Enquiry_ in its historical context, clarifying its relationship to Calvinism, to Newtonian science, and to earlier moral philosophers, and providing a persuasive account of Hume's ethical naturalism. --Martha C. Nussbaum, Brown University.

Sidgwick is usually considered to be a utilitarian, and with good reason. In an autobiographical fragment he tells us that his “first adhesion to a definite Ethical system was to the Utilitarianism of Mill”, and that after a variety of intellectual changes he became “a Utilitarian again, but on an Intuitional basis.” He refers to himself in other works and in letters as a utilitarian, and he was so viewed by his contemporaries. Hence it is understandable that Albee should view (...) The Methods of Ethics as “an independent contribution to the literature of Utilitarianism”, labelling it “the last authoritative utterance of traditional Utilitarianism”, and that almost everyone who discusses the book should agree with this classification of it. Yet Sidgwick did not himself say that the Methods is a defense or a restatement of utilitarianism. On the contrary: he was from the first at pains to disavow any intention of proving a system of morality and to insist that he is presenting only an examination of “the different methods of obtaining reasoned convictions as to what ought to be done which are to be found … in the moral consciousness of mankind generally.” In the “Preface” to the second edition he bemoans the misunderstanding which led critics to suppose that he was “writing as an assailant of two of the methods” he examines. One critic, he complains, thought he was giving “mere hostile criticism” of intuitionism, another “has constructed an article on the supposition that my principal object is ‘the suppression of Egoism’”. Yet a third critic, he remarks dryly, referring to a savage attack by F. H. Bradley, “has gone to the length of a pamphlet under the impression that the ‘main argument’ of my treatise is a demonstration of Universalistic Hedonism. I am concerned”, he comments, “to have caused so much misdirection of criticism”; and he goes on to reiterate his position about the two forms, egoistic and universalistic, of hedonism: “I do not hold the reasonableness of aiming at happiness generally with any stronger conviction than I do that of aiming at one’s own.”. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging, richly detailed, and philosophically provocative volume, Annas presents not a history of ancient ethics but a study of "the form and structure of ancient ethical theory". Ignoring Plato and his predecessors almost entirely, and thinking Aristotle overrated, Annas concentrates on post-Aristotelian moral philosophy. She is thoroughly at home in the new work on Hellenistic philosophy that scholars, herself included, have been publishing in the last couple of decades. Here she provides the fullest overview to date of Hellenistic (...) moral thought, beginning with Aristotle and covering the later Peripatetics, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Cyrenaics, and the Skeptics both Academic and Pyrrhonist. (shrink)

Adams 's suggestion that there must be one really right way of presenting the history of moral philosophy seems implausible to me, so I reject – with additional reasons – his charges against the structure of Invention of Autonomy. Skorupski's way of stating the ‘equal moral abilities’ thesis is not, I argue, very Kantian; a more Kantian version is not open to his objections. I am unconvinced by Schultz's claim that Sidgwick did not really hold that thesis. Deigh raises questions (...) I cannot reply to here, but I do offer some texts that seem to show that Sidgwick is not guilty of the confusion about ‘ought’ with which Deigh charges him. Correspondence:c1 jbs1@jhu.edu. (shrink)

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)

Kantian autonomy is often thought to be independent of time and place, but J. B. Schneewind in his landmark study, The Invention of Autonomy, has shown that there is much to be learned by setting Kant's moral philosophy in the context of the history of modern moral philosophy. The distinguished authors in the collection continue Schneewind's project by relating Kant's work to the historical context of his predecessors and to the empirical context of human agency. This will be a valuable (...) resource for professionals and advanced students in philosophy, the history of ideas, and the history of political thought. (shrink)

What is the function of moral principles within the body of moral knowledge? And what must be the nature of moral principles in order for them to carry out this function? A specific set of answers to these questions is widely accepted among moral philosophers – so widely accepted as almost to constitute a sort of orthodoxy. The answers embody a view of the place of principles within the body of morality which crosses the lines between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Though (...) I have put the question in cognitivist terms and shall discuss it in those terms, I think a similar question and a more or less parallel discussion could be given in non-cognitivist terms. Perhaps the time-honoured debate between the two positions can be suspended, at least temporarily, while we examine, not the nature of morality, but its structure. (shrink)

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rationalism about morality was repeatedly used to reject strong divine command theories of ethics. Such theories were morally unacceptable to many devout Christians. But deism, rationalist through and through, seemed to make revelation unnecessary, and with it most of Christianity. William Law, an influential divine command theorist of Hume's time, argued that Christians must consequently find rationalism unacceptable. Hume's effort to destroy moral rationalism functions to force his readers into a dilemma: either a morally (...) horrifying divine command view of morals, or almost no religion at all. (shrink)

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 its dominantly ahistorical character, the Journal of Religious Ethics has much in common with its counterparts among philosophical journals, show- ing as clearly as they do the widespread antihistorical bias of twentieth- century analytical philosophy. Moreover, such historical work as the journal has published has been tied unnecessarily closely to the voluntarist (divine command) paradigm. While drawing attention to the antivoluntarist strand in the history of ethics, the articles by John Bowlin, Mark Cladis, and Mark Larrimore, together with the (...) introduction by Jennifer Herdt, demonstrate that the purposes of inquiry in religious ethics are better served by attending to the past than by ignoring it. (shrink)