How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? And what of the more particular questions that face us: Is it right to be dishonest in a good cause? Can we justify living in opulence while elsewhere in the world people are starving? If conscripted to fight in a war we do not support, should we disobey the law? What are our obligations to the other creatures with whom we share this planet and to the generations of humans who will come after us?

Ethics deals with such questions at all levels. Its subject consists of the fundamental issues of practical decision making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong.

The terms ethics and morality are closely related. We now often refer to ethical judgments or ethical principles where it once would have been more common to speak of moral judgments or moral principles. These applications are an extension of the meaning of ethics. Strictly speaking, however, the term refers not to morality itself but to the field of study, or branch of inquiry, that has morality as its subject matter. In this sense, ethics is equivalent to moral philosophy.

Although ethics has always been viewed as a branch of philosophy, its all-embracing practical nature links it with many other areas of study, including anthropology, biology, economics, history, politics, sociology, and theology. Yet, ethics remains distinct from such disciplines because it is not a matter of factual knowledge in the way that the sciences and other branches of inquiry are. Rather, it has to do with determining the nature of normative theories and applying these sets of principles to practical moral problems.

The origins of ethics

Mythical accounts

Introduction of moral codes

When did ethics begin and how did it originate? If we are referring to ethics proper—i.e., the systematic study of what we ought to do—it is clear that ethics can only have come into existence when human beings started to reflect on the best way to live. This reflective stage emerged long after human societies had developed some kind of morality, usually in the form of customary standards of right and wrong conduct. The process of reflection tended to arise from such customs, even if in the end it may have found them wanting. Accordingly, ethics began with the introduction of the first moral codes.

Virtually every human society has some form of myth to explain the origin of morality. In the Louvre in Paris there is a black Babylonian column with a relief showing the sun god Shamash presenting the code of laws to Hammurabi. The Old Testament account of God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai might be considered another example. In Plato's Protagoras there is an avowedly mythical account of how Zeus took pity on the hapless humans, who, living in small groups and with inadequate teeth, weak claws, and lack of speed, were no match for the other beasts. To make up for these deficiencies, Zeus gave humans a moral sense and the capacity for law and justice, so that they could live in larger communities and cooperate with one another.

That morality should be invested with all the mystery and power of divine origin is not surprising. Nothing else could provide such strong reasons for accepting the moral law. By attributing a divine origin to morality, the priesthood became its interpreter and guardian, and thereby secured for itself a power that it would not readily relinquish. This link between morality and religion has been so firmly forged that it is still sometimes asserted that there can be no morality without religion. According to this view, ethics ceases to be an independent field of study. It becomes, instead, moral theology.

There is some difficulty, already known to Plato, with the view that morality was created by a divine power. In his dialogue Euthyphro, Plato considered the suggestion that it is divine approval that makes an action good. Plato pointed out that if this were the case, we could not say that the gods approve of the actions because the actions are good. Why then do the gods approve of these actions rather than others? Is their approval entirely arbitrary? Plato considered this impossible and so held that there must be some standards of right or wrong that are independent of the likes and dislikes of the gods. Modern philosophers have generally accepted Plato's argument because the alternative implies that if the gods had happened to approve of torturing children and to disapprove of helping one's neighbours, then torture would have been good and neighbourliness bad.

Problems of divine origin

A modern theist might say that since God is good, he could not possibly approve of torturing children nor disapprove of helping neighbours. In saying this, however, the theist would have tacitly admitted that there is a standard of goodness that is independent of God. Without an independent standard, it would be pointless to say that God is good; this could only mean that God is approved of by God. It seems therefore that, even for those who believe in the existence of God, it is impossible to give a satisfactory account of the origin of morality in terms of a divine creation. We need a different account.

There are other possible connections between religion and morality. It has been said that even if good and evil exist independently of God or the gods, only divine revelation can reliably inform us about good and evil. An obvious problem with this view is that those who receive divine revelations, or who consider themselves qualified to interpret them, do not always agree on what is good and what is evil. Without an accepted criterion for the authenticity of a revelation or an interpretation, we are no better off, so far as reaching moral agreement is concerned, than we would be if we were to decide on good and evil ourselves with no assistance from religion.

Traditionally, a more important link between religion and ethics was that religious teachings were thought to provide a reason for doing what is right. In its crudest form, the reason was that those who obey the moral law will be rewarded by an eternity of bliss while everyone else roasts in hell. In more sophisticated versions, the motivation provided by religion was less blatantly self-seeking and more of an inspirational kind. Whether in its crude or sophisticated version, or something in between, religion does provide an answer to one of the great questions of ethics: Why should I do what is right? As will be seen in the course of this article, however, the answer provided by religion is by no means the only answer. It will be considered after the alternatives have been examined.

Prehuman ethics

Nonhuman behaviour

Can we do better than the religious accounts of the origin of morality? Because, for obvious reasons, we have no historical record of a human society in the period before it had any standards of right and wrong, history cannot tell us the origins of morality. Nor is anthropology able to assist because all human societies studied have already had, except perhaps during the most extreme circumstances, their own form of morality. Fortunately there is another mode of inquiry open to us. Human beings are social animals. Living in a social group is a characteristic we share with many other animal species, including our closest relatives, the apes. Presumably, the common ancestor of humans and apes also lived in a social group, so that we were social beings before we were human beings. Here, then, in the social behaviour of nonhuman animals and in the evolutionary theory that explains such behaviour, we may find the origins of human morality.

Social life, even for nonhuman animals, requires constraints on behaviour. No group can stay together if its members make frequent, no-holds-barred attacks on one another. Social animals either refrain altogether from attacking other members of the social group, or, if an attack does take place, the ensuing struggle does not become a fight to the death—it is over when the weaker animal shows submissive behaviour. It is not difficult to see analogies here with human moral codes. The parallels, however, go much further than this. Like humans, social animals may behave in ways that benefit other members of the group at some cost or risk to themselves. Male baboons threaten predators and cover the rear as the troop retreats. Wolves and wild dogs bring meat back to members of the pack not present at the kill. Gibbons and chimpanzees with food will, in response to a gesture, share their food with others of the group. Dolphins support sick or injured animals, swimming under them for hours at a time and pushing them to the surface so they can breathe.

It may be thought that the existence of such apparently altruistic behaviour is odd, for evolutionary theory states that those who do not struggle to survive and reproduce will be wiped out in the ruthless competition known as natural selection. Research in evolutionary theory applied to social behaviour, however, has shown that evolution need not be quite so ruthless after all. Some of this altruistic behaviour is explained by kin selection. The most obvious examples are those in which parents make sacrifices for their offspring. If wolves help their cubs to survive, it is more likely that genetic characteristics, including the characteristic of helping their own cubs, will spread through further generations of wolves.

Kinship and reciprocity

Less obviously, the principle also holds for assistance to other close relatives, even if they are not descendants. A child shares 50 percent of the genes of each of its parents, but full siblings too, on the average, have 50 percent of their genes in common. Thus a tendency to sacrifice one's life for two or more of one's siblings could spread from one generation to the next. Between cousins, where only 12 1/2 percent of the genes are shared, the sacrifice-to-benefit ratio would have to be correspondingly increased.

When apparent altruism is not between kin, it may be based on reciprocity. A monkey will present its back to another monkey, who will pick out parasites; after a time the roles will be reversed. Reciprocity may also be a factor in food sharing among unrelated animals. Such reciprocity will pay off, in evolutionary terms, as long as the costs of helping are less than the benefits of being helped and as long as animals will not gain in the long run by “cheating”—that is to say, by receiving favours without returning them. It would seem that the best way to ensure that those who cheat do not prosper is for animals to be able to recognize cheats and refuse them the benefits of cooperation the next time around. This is only possible among intelligent animals living in small, stable groups over a long period of time. Evidence supports this conclusion: reciprocal behaviour has been observed in birds and mammals, the clearest cases occurring among wolves, wild dogs, dolphins, monkeys, and apes.

In short, kin altruism and reciprocity do exist, at least in some nonhuman animals living in groups. Could these forms of behaviour be the basis of human ethics? There are good reasons for believing that they could. A surprising proportion of human morality can be derived from the twin bases of concern for kin and reciprocity. Kinship is a source of obligation in every human society. A mother's duty to look after her children seems so obvious that it scarcely needs to be mentioned. The duty of a married man to support and protect his family is almost equally as widespread. Duties to close relatives take priority over duties to more distant relatives, but in most societies even distant relatives are still treated better than strangers.

If kinship is the most basic and universal tie between human beings, the bond of reciprocity is not far behind. It would be difficult to find a society that did not recognize, at least under some circumstances, an obligation to return favours. In many cultures this is taken to extraordinary lengths, and there are elaborate rituals of gift giving. Often the repayment has to be superior to the original gift, and this escalation can reach such extremes as to threaten the economic security of the donor. The huge “potlatch” feasts of certain American Indian tribes are a well-known example of this type of situation. Many Melanesian societies also place great importance on giving and receiving very substantial amounts of valuable items.

Many features of human morality could have grown out of simple reciprocal practices such as the mutual removal of parasites from awkward places. Suppose I want to have the lice in my hair picked out and I am willing in return to remove lice from someone else's hair. I must, however, choose my partner carefully. If I help everyone indiscriminately, I will find myself delousing others without getting my own lice removed. To avoid this, I must learn to distinguish between those who return favours and those who do not. In making this distinction, I am separating reciprocators and nonreciprocators and, in the process, developing crude notions of fairness and of cheating. I will strengthen my links with those who reciprocate, and bonds of friendship and loyalty, with a consequent sense of obligation to assist, will result.

This is not all. The reciprocators are likely to react in a hostile and angry way to those who do not reciprocate. Perhaps they will regard reciprocity as good and “right” and cheating as bad and “wrong.” From here it is a small step to concluding that the worst of the nonreciprocators should be driven out of society or else punished in some way, so that they will not take advantage of others again. Thus a system of punishment and a notion of desert constitute the other side of reciprocal altruism.

Although kinship and reciprocity loom large in human morality, they do not cover the entire field. Typically, there are obligations to other members of the village, tribe, or nation even when these are strangers. There may also be a loyalty to the group as a whole that is distinct from loyalty to individual members of the group. It may be at this point that human culture intervenes. Each society has a clear interest in promoting devotion to the group and can be expected to develop cultural influences that exalt those who make sacrifices for the sake of the group and revile those who put their own interests too far ahead of the interests of the group. More tangible rewards and punishments may supplement the persuasive effect of social opinion. This is simply the start of a process of cultural development of moral codes.

Before considering the cultural variations in human morality and their significance for ethics, let us draw together this discussion of the origins of morality. Since we are dealing with a prehistoric period and morality leaves no fossils, any account of the origins of morality will necessarily remain to some extent speculative. It seems likely that morality is the gradual outgrowth of forms of altruism that exist in some social animals and that are the result of the usual evolutionary processes of natural selection. No myths are required to explain its existence.

Anthropology and ethics

It is commonly believed that there are no ethical universals—i.e., there is so much variation from one culture to another that no single principle or judgment is generally accepted. We have already seen that such is not the case. Of course, there are immense differences in the way in which the broad principles so far discussed are applied. The duty of children to their parents meant one thing in traditional Chinese society and means something quite different in contemporary Anglo-Saxon society. Yet, concern for kin and reciprocity to those who treat us well are considered good in virtually all human societies. Also, all societies have, for obvious reasons, some constraints on killing and wounding other members of the group.

Beyond that common ground, the variations in moral attitudes soon become more striking than the similarities. Man's fascination with such variations goes back a long way. The Greek historian Herodotus relates that Darius, king of Persia, once summoned Greeks before him and asked them how much he would have to pay them to eat their fathers' dead bodies. They refused to do it at any price. Then Darius brought in some Indians who by custom ate the bodies of their parents and asked them what would make them willing to burn their fathers' bodies. The Indians cried out that he should not mention so horrid an act. Herodotus drew the obvious moral: each nation thinks its own customs best.

Variations in morals were not systematically studied until the 19th century, when knowledge of the more remote parts of the globe began to increase. At the beginning of the 20th century, Edward Westermarck published The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906–08), two large volumes comparing differences among societies in such matters as the wrongness of killing (including killing in warfare, euthanasia, suicide, infanticide, abortion, human sacrifices, and duelling); whose duty it is to support children, the aged, or the poor; the forms of sexual relationship permitted; the status of women; the right to property and what constitutes theft; the holding of slaves; the duty to tell the truth; dietary restrictions; concern for nonhuman animals; duties to the dead; and duties to the gods. Westermarck had no difficulty in demonstrating tremendous diversity in all these issues. More recent, though less comprehensive, studies have confirmed that human societies can and do flourish while holding radically different views about all such matters.

As noted earlier, ethics itself is not primarily concerned with the description of moral systems in different societies. That task, which remains on the level of description, is one for anthropology or sociology. In contrast, ethics deals with the justification of moral principles. Nevertheless, ethics must take note of the variations in moral systems because it has often been claimed that this knowledge shows that morality is simply a matter of what is customary and is always relative to a particular society. According to this view, no ethical principles can be valid except in terms of the society in which they are held. Words such as good and bad just mean, it is claimed, “approved in my society” or “disapproved in my society,” and so to search for an objective, or rationally justifiable, ethic is to search for what is in fact an illusion.

One way of replying to this position would be to stress the fact that there are some features common to virtually all human moralities. It might be thought that these common features must be the universally valid and objective core of morality. This argument would, however, involve a fallacy. If the explanation for the common features is simply that they are advantageous in terms of evolutionary theory, that does not make them right. Evolution is a blind force incapable of conferring a moral imprimatur on human behaviour. It may be a fact that concern for kin is in accord with evolutionary theory, but to say that concern for kin is therefore right would be to attempt to deduce values from facts. As will be seen later, it is not possible to deduce values from facts in this manner. In any case, that something is universally approved does not make it right. If all human societies enslaved any tribe they could conquer, some freethinking moralists might still insist that slavery is wrong. They could not be said to be talking nonsense merely because they had few supporters. Similarly, then, universal support for principles of kinship and reciprocity cannot prove that these principles are in some way objectively justified.

This example illustrates the way in which ethics differs from a descriptive science. From the standpoint of ethics, whether human moral codes closely parallel one another or are extraordinarily diverse, the question of how an individual should act remains open. If you are thinking deeply about what you should do, your uncertainty will not be overcome by being told what your society thinks you should do in the circumstances in which you find yourself. Even if you are told that virtually all other human societies agree, you may choose not to go that way. If you are told that there is great variation among human societies over what people should do in your circumstances, you may wonder whether there can be any objective answer, but your dilemma has still not been resolved. In fact, this diversity does not rule out the possibility of an objective answer either: conceivably, most societies simply got it wrong. This, too, is something that will be taken up later in this article, for the possibility of an objective morality is one of the constant themes of ethics.

Ancient ethics

The first ethical precepts were certainly passed down by word of mouth by parents and elders, but as societies learned to use the written word, they began to set down their ethical beliefs. These records constitute the first historical evidence of the origins of ethics.

The Middle East

The earliest surviving writings that might be taken as ethics textbooks are a series of lists of precepts to be learned by boys of the ruling class of Egypt, prepared some 3,000 years before the Christian Era. In most cases, they consist of shrewd advice on how to live happily, avoid unnecessary troubles, and advance one's career by cultivating the favour of superiors. There are, however, several passages that recommend more broadly based ideals of conduct, such as the following: Rulers should treat their people justly and judge impartially between their subjects. They should aim to make their people prosperous. Those who have bread are urged to share it with the hungry. Humble and lowly people must be treated with kindness. One should not laugh at the blind or at dwarfs.

Why then should one follow these precepts? Did the ancient Egyptians believe that one should do what is good for its own sake? The precepts frequently state that it will profit a man to act justly, much as we say that “honesty is the best policy.” They also emphasize the importance of having a good name. Since these precepts are intended for the instruction of the ruling classes, however, we have to ask why helping the destitute should have contributed to an individual's good reputation among this class. To some degree the authors of the precepts must have thought that to make people prosperous and happy and to be kind to those who have least is not merely personally advantageous but good in itself.

The precepts are not works of ethics in the philosophical sense. No attempt is made to find any underlying principles of conduct that might provide a more systematic understanding of ethics. Justice, for example, is given a prominent place, but there is no elaboration of the notion of justice nor any discussion of how disagreements about what is just and unjust might be resolved. Furthermore, there is no probing of ethical dilemmas that may occur if the precepts should conflict with one another. The precepts are full of sound observations and practical wisdom, but they do not encourage theoretical speculation.

The same practical bent can be found in other early codes or lists of ethical injunctions. The great codification of Babylonian law by Hammurabi is often said to have been based on the principle of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” as if this were some fundamental principle of justice, elaborated and applied to all cases. In fact, the code reflects no such consistent principle. It frequently prescribes the death penalty for offenses that do not themselves cause death—e.g., for robbery or for accepting bribes. Moreover, even the eye-for-an-eye rule applies only if the eye of the original victim is that of a member of the patrician class; if it is the eye of a commoner, the punishment is a fine of a quantity of silver. Apparently such differences in punishment were not thought to require justification. At any rate, there are no surviving attempts to defend the principles of justice on which the code was based.

The Hebrew people were at different times captives of both the Egyptians and the Babylonians. It is therefore not surprising that the law of ancient Israel, which was put into its definitive form during the Babylonian Exile, shows the influence both of the ancient Egyptian precepts and of the Code of Hammurabi. The book of Exodus refers, for example, to the principle of “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” Hebrew law does not differentiate, as the Babylonian law does, between patricians and commoners, but it does stipulate that in several respects foreigners may be treated in ways that it is not permissible to treat fellow Hebrews; for instance, Hebrew slaves, but not others, had to be freed without ransom in the seventh year. Yet, in other respects Israeli law and morality developed the humane concern shown in the Egyptian precepts for the poor and unfortunate: hired servants must be paid promptly, because they rely on their wages to satisfy their pressing needs; slaves must be allowed to rest on the seventh day; widows, orphans, and the blind and deaf must not be wronged, and the poor man should not be refused a loan. There was even a tithe providing for an incipient welfare state. The spirit of this humane concern was summed up by the injunction to “love thy neighbour as thyself,” a sweepingly generous form of the rule of reciprocity.

The famed Ten Commandments are thought to be a legacy of Semitic tribal law when important commands were taught, one for each finger, so that they could more easily be remembered. (Sets of five or 10 laws are common among preliterate civilizations.) The content of the Hebrew commandments differed from other laws of the region mainly in its emphasis on duties to God. In the more detailed laws laid down elsewhere, this emphasis continued with as much as half the legislation concerned with crimes against God and ceremonial and ritualistic matters, though there may be other explanations for some of these ostensibly religious requirements concerning the avoidance of certain foods and the need for ceremonial cleansings.

In addition to lengthy statements of the law, the surviving literature of ancient Israel includes both proverbs and the books of the prophets. The proverbs, like the precepts of the Egyptians, are brief statements without much concern for systematic presentation or overall coherence. They go further than the Egyptian precepts, however, in urging conduct that is just and upright and pleasing to God. There are correspondingly fewer references to what is needed for a successful career, although it is frequently stated that God rewards the just. In this connection the Book of Job is notable as an exploration of the problem raised for those who accept this motive for obeying the moral law: How are we to explain the fact that the best of people may suffer the worst misfortunes? The book offers no solution beyond faith in God, but the sharpened awareness of the problem it offers may have influenced some to adopt belief in reward and punishment in another realm as the only possible solution.

The literature of the prophets contains a good deal of social and ethical criticism, though more at the level of denunciation than discussion about what goodness really is or why there is so much wrongdoing. The Book of Isaiah is especially notable for its early portrayal of a utopia in which “the desert shall blossom as the rose . . . the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb . . . . They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.”

India

Unlike the ethical teaching of ancient Egypt and Babylon, Indian ethics was philosophical from the start. In the oldest of the Indian writings, the Vedas, ethics is an integral aspect of philosophical and religious speculation about the nature of reality. These writings date from about 1500 BC. They have been described as the oldest philosophical literature in the world, and what they say about how people ought to live may therefore be the first philosophical ethics.

The Vedas are, in a sense, hymns, but the gods to which they refer are not persons but manifestations of ultimate truth and reality. In the Vedic philosophy, the basic principle of the universe, the ultimate reality on which the cosmos exists, is the principle of Ritam, which is the word from which the Western notion of right is derived. There is thus a belief in a right moral order somehow built into the universe itself. Hence, truth and right are linked; to penetrate through illusion and understand the ultimate truth of human existence is to understand what is right. To be an enlightened one is to know what is real and to live rightly, for these are not two separate things but one and the same.

The ethic that is thus traced to the very essence of the universe is not without its detailed practical applications. These were based on four ideals, or proper goals, of life: prosperity, the satisfaction of desires, moral duty, and spiritual perfection—i.e., liberation from a finite existence. From these ends follow certain virtues: honesty, rectitude, charity, nonviolence, modesty, and purity of heart. To be condemned, on the other hand, are falsehood, egoism, cruelty, adultery, theft, and injury to living things. Because the eternal moral law is part of the universe, to do what is praiseworthy is to act in harmony with the universe and accordingly will receive its proper reward; conversely, once the true nature of the self is understood, it becomes apparent that those who do what is wrong are acting self-destructively.

The basic principles underwent considerable modification over the ensuing centuries, especially in the Upanisads, a body of philosophical literature dating from 800 BC. The Indian caste system, with its intricate laws about what members of each caste may or may not do, is accepted by the Upanisads as part of the proper order of the universe. Ethics itself, however, is not regarded as a matter of conformity to laws. Instead, the desire to be ethical is an inner desire. It is part of the quest for spiritual perfection, which in turn is elevated to the highest of the four goals of life.

During the following centuries the ethical philosophy of this early period gradually became a rigid and dogmatic system that provoked several reactions. One, which is uncharacteristic of Indian thought in general, was the Carvaka, or materialist school, which mocked religious ceremonies, saying that they were invented by the Brahmans (the priestly caste) to ensure their livelihood. When the Brahmans defended animal sacrifices by claiming that the sacrificed beast goes straight to heaven, the members of the Carvaka asked why the Brahmans did not kill their aged parents to hasten their arrival in heaven. Against the postulation of an eventual spiritual liberation, Carvaka ethics urged each individual to seek his or her pleasure here and now.

Jainism, another reaction to the traditional Vedic outlook, went in exactly the opposite direction. The Jaina philosophy is based on spiritual liberation as the highest of all goals and nonviolence as the means to it. In true philosophical manner, the Jainas found in the principle of nonviolence a guide to all morality. First, apart from the obvious application to prohibiting violent acts to other humans, nonviolence is extended to all living things. The Jainas are vegetarian. They are often ridiculed by Westerners for the care they take to avoid injuring insects or other living things while walking or drinking water that may contain minute organisms; it is less well known that Jainas began to care for sick and injured animals thousands of years before animal shelters were thought of in Europe. The Jainas do not draw the distinction usually made in Western ethics between their responsibility for what they do and their responsibility for what they omit doing. Omitting to care for an injured animal would also be in their view a form of violence.

Other moral duties are also derived from the notion of nonviolence. To tell someone a lie, for example, is regarded as inflicting a mental injury on that person. Stealing, of course, is another form of injury, but because of the absence of a distinction between acts and omissions, even the possession of wealth is seen as depriving the poor and hungry of the means to satisfy their wants. Thus nonviolence leads to a principle of nonpossession of property. Jaina priests were expected to be strict ascetics and to avoid sexual intercourse. Ordinary Jainas, however, followed a slightly less severe code, which was intended to give effect to the major forms of nonviolence while still being compatible with a normal life.

The other great ethical system to develop as a reaction to the ossified form of the old Vedic philosophy was Buddhism. The person who became known as the Buddha, which means the “enlightened one,” was born about 563 BC, the son of a king. Until he was 29 years old, he lived the sheltered life of a typical prince, with every luxury he could desire. At that time, legend has it, he was jolted out of his idleness by the “Four Signs”: he saw in rapid succession a very feeble old man, a hideous leper, a funeral, and a venerable ascetic monk. He began to think about old age, disease, and death, and decided to follow the way of the monk. For six years he led an ascetic life of renunciation, but finally, while meditating under a tree, he concluded that the solution was not withdrawal from the world, but rather a practical life of compassion for all.

Buddhism is often thought to be a religion, and indeed over the centuries it has adopted in many places the trappings of religion. This is an irony of history, however, because the Buddha himself was a strong critic of religion. He rejected the authority of the Vedas and refused to set up any alternative creed. He saw religious ceremonies as a waste of time and theological beliefs as mere superstition. He refused to discuss abstract metaphysical problems such as the immortality of the soul. The Buddha told his followers to think for themselves and take responsibility for their own future. In place of religious beliefs and religious ceremonies, the Buddha advocated a life devoted to universal compassion and brotherhood. Through such a life one might reach the ultimate goal, Nirvana, a state in which all living things are free from pain and sorrow. There are similarities between this ethic of universal compassion and the ethics of the Jainas. Nevertheless, the Buddha was the first historical figure to develop such a boundless ethic.

In keeping with his own previous experience, the Buddha proposed a “middle path” between self-indulgence and self-renunciation. In fact, it is not so much a path between these two extremes as one that draws together the benefits of both. Through living a life of compassion and love for all, a person achieves the liberation from selfish cravings sought by the ascetic and a serenity and satisfaction that are more fulfilling than anything obtained by indulgence in pleasure.

It is sometimes thought that because the Buddhist goal is Nirvana, a state of freedom from pain and sorrow that can be reached by meditation, Buddhism teaches a withdrawal from the real world. Nirvana, however, is not to be sought for oneself alone; it is regarded as a unity of the individual self with the universal self in which all things take part. In the Mahayana school of Buddhism, the aspirant for Enlightenment even takes a vow not to accept final release until everything that exists in the universe has attained Nirvana.

The Buddha lived and taught in India, and so Buddhism is properly classified as an Indian ethical philosophy. Yet, Buddhism did not take hold in the land of its origin. Instead, it spread in different forms south into Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and north through Tibet to China, Korea, and Japan. In the process, Buddhism suffered the same fate as the Vedic philosophy against which it had rebelled: it became a religion, often rigid, with its own sects, ceremonies, and superstitions.

China

The two greatest moral philosophers of ancient China, Lao-tzu (flourished c. 6th century BC) and Confucius (551–479 BC), thought in very different ways. Lao-tzu is best known for his ideas about the Tao (literally “Way,” the Supreme Principle). The Tao is based on the traditional Chinese virtues of simplicity and sincerity. To follow the Tao is not a matter of keeping to any set list of duties or prohibitions, but rather of living in a simple and honest manner, being true to oneself, and avoiding the distractions of ordinary living. Lao-tzu's classic book on the Tao, Tao-te Ching, consists only of aphorisms and isolated paragraphs, making it difficult to draw an intelligible system of ethics from it. Perhaps this is because Lao-tzu was a type of moral skeptic: he rejected both righteousness and benevolence, apparently because he saw them as imposed on individuals from without rather than coming from their own inner nature. Like the Buddha, Lao-tzu found the things prized by the world—rank, luxury, and glamour—to be empty, worthless values when compared with the ultimate value of the peaceful inner life. He also emphasized gentleness, calm, and nonviolence. Nearly 600 years before Jesus, he said: “It is the way of the Tao . . . to recompense injury with kindness.” By returning good for good and also good for evil, Lao-tzu believed that all would become good; to return evil for evil would lead to chaos.

The lives of Lao-tzu and Confucius overlapped, and there is even an account of a meeting between them, which is said to have left the younger Confucius baffled. Confucius was the more down-to-earth thinker, absorbed in the practical task of social reform. When he was a provincial minister of justice, the province became renowned for the honesty of its people and their respect for the aged and their care for the poor. Probably because of its practical nature, the teachings of Confucius had a far greater influence on China than did those of the more withdrawn Lao-tzu.

Confucius did not organize his recommendations into any coherent system. His teachings are offered in the form of sayings, aphorisms, and anecdotes, usually in reply to questions by disciples. They aim at guiding the audience in what is necessary to become a better person, a concept translated as “gentleman” or “the superior man.” In opposition to the prevailing feudal ideal of the aristocratic lord, Confucius presented the superior man as one who is humane and thoughtful, motivated by the desire to do what is good rather than by personal profit. Beyond this, however, the concept is not discussed in any detail; it is only shown by diverse examples, some of them trite: “A superior man's life leads upwards . . . . The superior man is broad and fair; the inferior man takes sides and is petty . . . . A superior man shapes the good in man; he does not shape the bad in him.”

One of the recorded sayings of Confucius is an answer to a request from a disciple for a single word that could serve as a guide to conduct for one's entire life. He replied: “Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” This rule is repeated several times in the Confucian literature and might be considered the supreme principle of Confucian ethics. Other duties are not, however, presented as derivative from this supreme principle, nor is the principle used to determine what is to be done when more specific duties—e.g., duties to parents and duties to friends, both of which were given prominence in Confucian ethics—should clash.

Confucius did not explain why the superior man chose righteousness rather than personal profit. This question was taken up more than 100 years after his death by his follower Mencius, who asserted that humans are naturally inclined to do what is humane and right. Evil is not in human nature but is the result of poor upbringing or lack of education. But Confucius also had another distinguished follower, Hsün-tzu, who said that man's nature is to seek self-profit and to envy others. The rules of morality are designed to avoid the strife that would otherwise follow from this nature. The Confucian school was united in its ideal of the superior man but divided over whether such an ideal was to be obtained by allowing people to fulfill their natural desires or by educating them to control those desires.

Ancient Greece

Early Greece was the birthplace of Western philosophical ethics. The ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who flourished in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, will be discussed in the next section. The sudden blooming of philosophy during that period had its roots in the ethical thought of earlier centuries. In the poetic literature of the 7th and 6th centuries BC, there were, as in the early development of ethics in other cultures, ethical precepts but no real attempts to formulate a coherent overall ethical position. The Greeks were later to refer to the most prominent of these poets and early philosophers as the seven sages, and they are frequently quoted with respect by Plato and Aristotle. Knowledge of the thought of this period is limited, for often only fragments of original writings, along with later accounts of dubious accuracy, remain.

Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 BC), whose name is familiar because of the geometrical theorem that bears his name, is one such early Greek thinker about whom little is known. He appears to have written nothing at all, but he was the founder of a school of thought that touched on all aspects of life and that may have been a kind of philosophical and religious order. In ancient times the school was best known for its advocacy of vegetarianism, which, like that of the Jainas, was associated with the belief that after the death of the body, the human soul may take up residence in the body of an animal. Pythagoreans continued to espouse this view for many centuries, and classical passages in the works of such writers as Ovid and Porphyry opposing bloodshed and animal slaughter can be traced back to Pythagoras.

Ironically, an important stimulus for the development of moral philosophy came from a group of teachers to whom the later Greek philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—were consistently hostile: the Sophists. This term was used in the 5th century to refer to a class of professional teachers of rhetoric and argument. The Sophists promised their pupils success in political debate and increased influence in the affairs of the city. They were accused of being mercenaries who taught their students to win arguments by fair means or foul. Aristotle said that Protagoras, perhaps the most famous of them, claimed to teach how “to make the weaker argument the stronger.”

The Sophists, however, were more than mere teachers of rhetorical tricks. They saw their role as imparting the cultural and intellectual qualities necessary for success, and their involvement with argument about practical affairs led them to develop views about ethics. The recurrent theme in the views of the better known Sophists, such as Protagoras, Antiphon, and Thrasymachus, is that what is commonly called good and bad or just and unjust does not reflect any objective fact of nature but is rather a matter of social convention. It is to Protagoras that we owe the celebrated epigram summing up this theme, “Man is the measure of all things.” Plato represents him as saying “Whatever things seem just and fine to each city, are just and fine for that city, so long as it thinks them so.” Protagoras, like Herodotus, was an early social relativist, but he drew a moderate conclusion from his relativism. He argued that while the particular content of the moral rules may vary, there must be rules of some kind if life is to be tolerable. Thus Protagoras stated that the foundations of an ethical system needed nothing from the gods or from any special metaphysical realm beyond the ordinary world of the senses.

The Sophist Thrasymachus appears to have taken a more radical approach—if Plato's portrayal of his views is historically accurate. He explained that the concept of justice means nothing more than obedience to the laws of society, and, since these laws are made by the strongest political group in their own interests, justice represents nothing but the interests of the stronger. This position is often represented by the slogan “Might is right.” Thrasymachus was probably not saying, however, that whatever the mightiest do really is right; he is more likely to have been denying that the distinction between right and wrong has any objective basis. Presumably he would then encourage his pupils to follow their own interests as best they could. He is thus an early representative of Skepticism about morals and perhaps of a form of egoism, the view that the rational thing to do is follow one's own interests.

It is not surprising that with ideas of this sort in circulation other thinkers should react by probing more deeply into ethics to see if the potentially destructive conclusions of some of the Sophists could be resisted. This reaction produced works that have served ever since as the cornerstone for the entire edifice of Western ethics.

Western ethics from Socrates to the 20th century

The Classical Period of Greek ethics

Socrates

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates once observed. This thought typifies his questioning, philosophical approach to ethics. Socrates, who lived from about 470 BC until he was put to death in 399 BC, must be regarded as one of the greatest teachers of ethics. Yet, unlike other figures of comparable importance such as the Buddha or Confucius, he did not tell his audience how they should live. What Socrates taught was a method of inquiry. When the Sophists or their pupils boasted that they knew what justice, piety, temperance, or law was, Socrates would ask them to give an account of it and then show that the account offered was entirely inadequate. For instance, against the received wisdom that justice consists in keeping promises and paying debts, Socrates put forth the example of a person faced with an unusual situation: a friend from whom he borrowed a weapon has since become insane but wants the weapon back. Conventional morality gives no clear answer to this dilemma; therefore, the original definition of justice has to be reformulated. So the Socratic dialogue gets under way.

Because his method of inquiry threatened conventional beliefs, Socrates' enemies contrived to have him put to death on a charge of corrupting the youth of Athens. For those who saw adherence to the conventional moral code as more desirable than the cultivation of an inquiring mind, the charge was appropriate. By conventional standards, Socrates was indeed corrupting the youth of Athens, but he himself saw the destruction of beliefs that could not stand up to criticism as a necessary preliminary to the search for true knowledge. Here, he differed from the Sophists with their moral relativism, for he thought that virtue is something that can be known and that the good person is the one who knows of what virtue, or justice, consists.

It is therefore not entirely accurate to see Socrates as contributing a method of inquiry but no positive views of his own. He believed in goodness as something that can be known, even though he did not himself profess to know it. He also thought that those who know what good is are in fact good. This latter belief seems peculiar today, because we make a sharp distinction between what is good and what is in a person's own interests. Accordingly, it does not seem surprising if people know what they ought morally to do but then proceed to do what is in their own interests instead. How to provide such people with reasons for doing what is right has been a major problem for Western ethics. Socrates did not see a problem here at all; in his view anyone who does not act well must simply be ignorant of the nature of goodness. Socrates could say this because in ancient Greece the distinction between goodness and self-interest was not made, or at least not in the clear-cut manner that it is today. The Greeks believed that virtue is good both for the individual and for the community. To be sure, they recognized that to live virtuously might not be the best way to prosper financially, but then they did not assume, as we are prone to do, that material wealth is a major factor in whether a person's life goes well or ill.

Plato

Socrates' greatest disciple, Plato (428/427–348/347 BC), accepted the key Socratic beliefs in the objectivity of goodness and in the link between knowing what is good and doing it. He also took over the Socratic method of conducting philosophy, developing the case for his own positions by exposing errors and confusions in the arguments of his opponents. He did this by writing his works as dialogues in which Socrates is portrayed as engaging in argument with others, usually Sophists. The early dialogues are generally accepted as reasonably accurate accounts of Socrates' views, but the later ones, written many years after the death of Socrates, use the latter as a mouthpiece for ideas and arguments that were Plato's rather than those of the historical Socrates.

In the most famous of Plato's dialogues, Politeia (The Republic), the imaginary Socrates is challenged by the following example: Suppose a person obtained the legendary ring of Gyges, which has the magical property of rendering the wearer invisible. Would that person still have any reason to behave justly? Behind this challenge lies the suggestion, made by the Sophists and still heard today, that the only reason for acting justly is that one cannot get away with acting unjustly. Plato's response to this challenge is a long argument developing a position that appears to go beyond anything the historical Socrates asserted. Plato maintained that true knowledge consists not in knowing particular things but in knowing something general that is common to all the particular cases. This is obviously derived from the way in which Socrates would press his opponents to go beyond merely describing particular good, or temperate, or just acts, and to give instead a general account of goodness, or temperance, or justice. The implication is that we do not know what goodness is unless we can give this general account. But the question then arises, what is it that we know when we know this general idea of goodness? Plato's answer seems to be that what we know is some general form or idea of goodness, which is shared by every particular thing that is good. Yet, if we are truly to be able to know this form or idea of goodness, it seems to follow that it must really exist. Plato accepts this implication. His theory of forms is the view that when we know what goodness is, we have knowledge of something that is the common element in virtue of which all good things are good and, at the same time, is some existing thing, the pure form of goodness.

It has been said that all of Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato. Certainly the central issue around which all of Western ethics has revolved can be traced back to the debate between the Sophists, on the one hand, with their claims that goodness and justice are relative to the customs of each society or, worse still, merely a disguise for the interests of the stronger, and, on the other, Plato's defense of the possibility of knowledge of an objective form or idea of goodness.

But even if we know what goodness or justice is, why should we act justly if we can profit by doing the opposite? This remaining part of the challenge posed by the legendary ring of Gyges is still to be answered, for even if we accept that goodness is objective, it does not follow that we all have sufficient reason to do what is good. Whether goodness leads to happiness is, as has been seen from the preceding discussion of early ethics in other cultures, a perennial topic for all who think about ethics. Plato's answer is that justice consists in harmony between the three elements of the soul: intellect, emotion, and desire. The unjust person lives in an unsatisfactory state of internal discord, trying always to overcome the discomfort of unsatisfied desire but never achieving anything better than the mere absence of want. The soul of the good person, on the other hand, is harmoniously ordered under the governance of reason, and the good person finds truly satisfying enjoyment in the pursuit of knowledge. Plato remarks that the highest pleasure, in fact, comes from intellectual speculation. He also gives an argument for the belief that the human soul is immortal; therefore, even if just individuals seem to be living in poverty or illness, the gods will not neglect them in the next life, and there they will have the greatest rewards of all. In summary, then, Plato asserts that we should act justly because in doing so we are “at one with ourselves and with the gods.”

Today, this may seem like a strange account of justice and a farfetched view of what it takes to achieve human happiness. Plato does not recommend justice for its own sake, independently of any personal gains one might obtain from being a just person. This is characteristic of Greek ethics, with its refusal to recognize that there could be an irresolvable conflict between one's own interest and the good of the community. Not until Immanuel Kant, in the 18th century, does a philosopher forcefully assert the importance of doing what is right simply because it is right quite apart from self-interested motivation. To be sure, Plato must not be interpreted as holding that the motivation for each and every just act is some personal gain; on the contrary, the person who takes up justice will do what is just because it is just. Nevertheless, Plato accepts the assumption of his opponents that one could not recommend taking up justice in the first place unless doing so could be shown to be advantageous for oneself as well as for others.

In spite of the fact that many people now think differently about this connection between morality and self-interest, Plato's attempt to argue that those who are just are in the long run happier than those who are unjust has had an enormous influence on Western ethics. Like Plato's views on the objectivity of goodness, the claim that justice and personal happiness are linked has helped to frame the agenda for a debate that continues even today.

Aristotle

Plato founded a school of philosophy in Athens known as the Academy. Here Aristotle (384–322 BC), Plato's younger contemporary and only rival in terms of influence on the course of Western philosophy, came to study. Aristotle was often fiercely critical of Plato, and his writing is very different in style and content, but the time they spent together is reflected in a considerable amount of common ground. Thus Aristotle holds with Plato that the life of virtue is rewarding for the virtuous, as well as beneficial for the community. Aristotle also agrees that the highest and most satisfying form of human existence is that in which man exercises his rational faculties to the fullest extent. One major difference is that Aristotle does not accept Plato's theory of common essences, or universal ideas, existing independently of particular things. Thus he does not argue that the path to goodness is through knowledge of the universal form or idea of “the good.”

Aristotle's ethics are based on his view of the universe. He saw it as a hierarchy in which everything has a function. The highest form of existence is the life of the rational being, and the function of lower beings is to serve this form of life. This led him to defend slavery—because he thought barbarians were less rational than Greeks and by nature suited to be “living tools”—and the killing of nonhuman animals for food or clothing. From this also came a view of human nature and an ethical theory derived from it. All living things, Aristotle held, have inherent potentialities and it is their nature to develop that potential to the full. This is the form of life properly suited to them and constitutes their goal. What, however, is the potentiality of human beings? For Aristotle this question turns out to be equivalent to asking what it is that is distinctive about human beings, and this, of course, is the capacity to reason. The ultimate goal of humans, therefore, is to develop their reasoning powers. When they do this, they are living well, in accordance with their true nature, and they will find this the most rewarding existence possible.

Aristotle thus ends up agreeing with Plato that the life of the intellect is the highest form of life; though having a greater sense of realism than Plato, he tempered this view with the suggestion that the best feasible life for humans must also have the goods of material prosperity and close friendships. Aristotle's argument for regarding the life of the intellect so highly, however, is different from that used by Plato; and the difference is significant because Aristotle committed a fallacy that has often been repeated. The fallacy is to assume that whatever capacity distinguishes humans from other beings is, for that very reason, the highest and best of their capacities. Perhaps the ability to reason is the best of our capacities, but we cannot be compelled to draw this conclusion from the fact that it is what is most distinctive of the human species.

A broader and still more pervasive fallacy underlies Aristotle's ethics. It is the idea that an investigation of human nature can reveal what we ought to do. For Aristotle, an examination of a knife would reveal that its distinctive quality is to cut, and from this we could conclude that a good knife would be a knife that cuts well. In the same way, an examination of human nature should reveal the distinctive quality of human beings, and from this we should be able to conclude what it is to be a good human being. This line of thought makes sense if we think, as Aristotle did, that the universe as a whole has a purpose and that we exist as part of such a goal-directed scheme of things, but its error becomes glaring once we reject this view and come to see our existence as the result of a blind process of evolution. Then we know that the standards of quality for knives are a result of the fact that knives are made with a specific purpose in mind and that a good knife is one that fills this purpose well. Human beings, however, were not made with any particular purpose in mind. Their nature is the result of random forces of natural selection and thus cannot, without further moral premises, determine how they ought to live.

It is to Aristotle that we owe the notion of the final end, or, as it was later called by medieval scholars, the summum bonum—the overall good for human beings. This can be found, Aristotle wrote, by asking why we do the things that we do. If we ask why we chop wood, the answer may be to build a fire; and if we ask why we build a fire, it may be to keep warm; but, if we ask why we keep warm, the answer is likely to be simply that it is pleasant to be warm and unpleasant to be cold. We can ask the same kind of questions about other activities; the answer always points, Aristotle thought, to what he called eudaimonia. This Greek word is usually translated as “happiness,” but this is only accurate if we understand that term in its broadest sense to mean living a fulfilling, satisfying life. Happiness in the narrower sense of joy or pleasure would certainly be a concomitant of such a life, but it is not happiness in this narrower sense that is the goal.

In searching for the overall good, Aristotle separates what may be called instrumental goods from intrinsic goods. The former are good only because they lead to something else that is good; the latter are good in themselves. The distinction is neglected in the early lists of ethical precepts that were surveyed above, but it is of the first importance if a firmly grounded answer to questions about how one ought to live is to be obtained.

Aristotle is also responsible for much later thinking about the virtues one should cultivate. In his most important ethical treatise, the Ethica Nicomachea (Nicomachean Ethics), he sorts through the virtues as they were popularly understood in his day, specifying in each case what is truly virtuous and what is mistakenly thought to be so. Here, he uses the idea of the Golden Mean, which is essentially the same idea as the Buddha's middle path between self-indulgence and self-renunciation. Thus courage, for example, is the mean between two extremes: one can have a deficiency of it, which is cowardice, or one can have an excess of it, which is foolhardiness. The virtue of friendliness, to give another example, is the mean between obsequiousness and surliness.

Aristotle does not intend the idea of the mean to be applied mechanically in every instance: he says that in the case of the virtue of temperance, or self-restraint, it is easy to find the excess of self-indulgence in the physical pleasures, but the opposite error, insufficient concern for such pleasures, scarcely exists. (The Buddha, with his experience of the ascetic life of renunciation, would not have agreed.) This caution in the application of the idea is just as well, for while it may be a useful device for moral education, the notion of a mean cannot help us to discover new truths about virtue. We can only arrive at the mean if we already have a notion as to what is an excess and what is a defect of the trait in question, but this is not something to be discovered by a morally neutral inspection of the trait itself. We need a prior conception of the virtue in order to decide what is excessive and what is defective. To attempt to use the doctrine of the mean to define the particular virtues would be to travel in a circle.

Aristotle's list of the virtues differs from later Christian lists. Courage, temperance, and liberality are common to both periods, but Aristotle also includes a virtue that literally means “greatness of soul.” This is the characteristic of holding a high opinion of oneself. The corresponding vice of excess is unjustified vanity, but the vice of deficiency is humility, which for Christians is a virtue.

Aristotle's discussion of the virtue of justice has been the starting point for almost all Western accounts. He distinguishes between justice in the distribution of wealth or other goods and justice in reparation, as, for example, in punishing someone for a wrong he has done. The key element of justice, according to Aristotle, is treating like cases alike—an idea that has set later thinkers the task of working out which similarities (need, desert, talent) are relevant. As with the notion of virtue as a mean, Aristotle's conception of justice provides a framework that needs to be filled in before it can be put to use.

Aristotle distinguished between theoretical and practical wisdom. His concept of practical wisdom is significant, for it goes beyond merely choosing the means best suited to whatever ends or goals one may have. The practically wise person also has the right ends. This implies that one's ends are not purely a matter of brute desires or feelings; the right ends are something that can be known. It also gives rise to the problem that faced Socrates: How is it that people can know the difference between good and bad and still choose what is bad? As noted earlier, Socrates simply denied that this could happen, saying that those who did not choose the good must, appearances notwithstanding, be ignorant of what it is. Aristotle said that this view of Socrates was “plainly at variance with the observed facts” and, instead, offered a detailed account of the ways in which one can possess knowledge and yet not act on it because of lack of control or weakness of will.

Later Greek and Roman ethics

In ethics, as in many other fields, the later Greek and Roman periods do not display the same penetrating insight as the Classic period of 5th- and 4th-century Greek civilization. Nevertheless, the two dominant schools of thought, Stoicism and Epicureanism, represent important approaches to the question of how one ought to live.

The Stoics

Stoicism had its origins in the views of Socrates and Plato, as modified by Zeno and then by Chrysippus in the 3rd century BC. It gradually gained influence in Rome, chiefly through the teachings of Cicero (106–43 BC) and then later in the 1st century AD through those of Seneca. Remarkably, its chief proponents include both a slave, Epictetus, and an emperor, Marcus Aurelius. This is a fine illustration of the Stoic message that what is important is the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, a pursuit that is open to all human beings owing to their common capacity for reason and that can be carried out no matter what the external circumstances of their lives.

Today, the word stoic conjures up one who remains unmoved by the sorrows and afflictions that distress the rest of humanity. This is an accurate representation of a stoic ideal, but it must be placed in the context of a systematic approach to life. Plato held that human passions and physical desires are in need of regulation by reason (see above Plato). The Stoics went further: they rejected passions altogether as a basis for deciding what is good or bad. Physical desires cannot simply be abolished, but when we become wise we appreciate the difference between wanting something and judging it to be good. Our desires make us want something, but only our reason can judge the goodness of what is wanted. If we are wise, we will identify with our reason, not with our desires; hence, we will not place our hopes on the attainment of our physical desires nor our anxieties on our failure to attain them. Wise Stoics will feel physical pain as others do, but in their minds they will know that physical pain leaves the true reasoning self untouched. The only thing that is truly good is to live in a state of wisdom and virtue. In aiming at such a life, we are not subject to the same play of fortune that afflicts us when we aim at physical pleasure or material wealth, for wisdom and virtue are matters of the intellect and under our own control. Moreover, if matters become too grim, there is always a way of ending the pain of the physical world. The Stoics were not reluctant to counsel suicide as a means of avoiding otherwise inescapable pain.

Perhaps the most important legacy of Stoicism, however, is its conviction that all human beings share the capacity to reason. This led the Stoics to a fundamental sense of equality, which went beyond the limited Greek conception of equal citizenship. Thus Seneca claimed that the wise man will esteem the community of rational beings far above any particular community in which the accident of birth has placed him, and Marcus Aurelius said that common reason makes all individuals fellow citizens. The belief that human reasoning capacities are common to all was also important, because from it the Stoics drew the implication that there is a universal moral law, which all people are capable of appreciating. The Stoics thus strengthened the tradition that sees the universality of reason as the basis on which ethical relativism is to be rejected.

The Epicureans

While the modern use of the term stoic accurately represents at least a part of the Stoic philosophy, anyone taking the present-day meaning of epicure as a guide to the philosophy of Epicurus (341–270 BC) would go astray. True, the Epicureans regarded pleasure as the sole ultimate good and pain as the sole evil; and they did regard the more refined pleasures as superior, simply in terms of the quantity and durability of the pleasure they provided, to the coarser pleasures. To portray them as searching for these more refined pleasures by dining at the best restaurants and drinking the finest wines, however, is the reverse of the truth. By refined pleasures, Epicurus meant pleasures of the mind, as opposed to the coarse pleasures of the body. He taught that the highest pleasure obtainable is the pleasure of tranquillity, which is to be obtained by the removal of unsatisfied wants. The way to do this is to eliminate all but the simplest wants; these are then easily satisfied even by those who are not wealthy.

Epicurus developed his position systematically. To determine whether something is good, he would ask if it increased pleasure or reduced pain. If it did, it was good as a means; if it did not, it was not good at all. Thus justice was good but merely as an expedient arrangement to prevent mutual harm. Why not then commit injustice when we can get away with it? Only because, Epicurus says, the perpetual dread of discovery will cause painful anxiety. Epicurus also exalted friendship, and the Epicureans were famous for the warmth of their personal relationships; but, again, they proclaimed that friendship is good only because of its tendency to create pleasure.

Both Stoic and Epicurean ethics can be seen as precursors of later trends in Western ethics: the Stoics of the modern belief in equality and the Epicureans of a Utilitarian ethic based on pleasure. The development of these ethical positions, however, was dramatically affected by the spreading from the East of a new religion that had its roots in a Jewish conception of ethics as obedience to a divine authority. With the conversion of Emperor Constantine I to Christianity by AD 313, the older schools of philosophy lost their sway over the thinking of the Roman Empire.

Christian ethics from the New Testament to the Scholastics

Ethics in the New Testament

Matthew reports Jesus as having said, in the Sermon on the Mount, that he came not to destroy the law of the prophets but to fulfill it. Indeed, when Jesus is regarded as a teacher of ethics, it is clear that he was more a reformer of the Hebrew tradition than a radical innovator. The Hebrew tradition had a tendency to place great emphasis on compliance with the letter of the law; the Gospel accounts of Jesus portray him as preaching against this “righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees,” championing the spirit rather than the letter of the law. This spirit he characterized as one of love, for God and for one's neighbour. But since he was not proposing that the old teachings be discarded, he saw no need to develop a comprehensive ethical system. Christianity thus never really broke with the Jewish conception of morality as a matter of divine law to be discovered by reading and interpreting the word of God as revealed in the Scriptures.

This conception of morality had important consequences for the future development of Western ethics. The Greeks and Romans, and indeed thinkers such as Confucius too, did not have the Western conception of a distinctively moral realm of conduct. For them, everything that one did was a matter of practical reasoning, in which one could do well or poorly. In the more legalistic Judeo-Christian view, however, it is one thing to lack practical wisdom in, say, household budgeting, and a quite different and much more serious matter to fall short of what the moral law requires. This distinction between the moral and the nonmoral realms now affects every question in Western ethics, including the very way the questions themselves are framed.

Another consequence of the retention of the basically legalistic stance of Jewish ethics was that from the beginning Christian ethics had to deal with the question of how to judge the person who breaks the law from good motives or keeps it from bad motives. The latter half of this question was particularly acute because the Gospels describe Jesus as repeatedly warning of a coming resurrection of the dead at which time all would be judged and punished or rewarded according to their sins and virtues in this life. The punishments and rewards were weighty enough to motivate anyone who took this message seriously; and it was given added emphasis by the fact that it was not going to be long in coming. (Jesus said that it would take place during the lifetime of some of those listening to him.) This is, therefore, an ethic that invokes external sanctions as a reason for doing what is right, in contrast to Plato or Aristotle for whom happiness is an internal element of a virtuous life. At the same time, it is an ethic that places love above mere literal compliance with the law. These two aspects do not sit easily together. Can one love God and neighbour in order to be rewarded with eternal happiness in another life?

The fact that Jesus and Paul, too, believed in the imminence of the Second Coming led them to suggest ways of living that were scarcely feasible on any other assumption: taking no thought for the morrow; turning the other cheek; and giving away all one has. Even Paul's preference for celibacy rather than marriage and his grudging acceptance of the latter on the basis that “It is better to marry than to burn” makes some sense once we grasp that he was proposing ethical standards for what he thought would be the last generation on earth. When the expected event did not occur and Christianity became the official religion of the vast and embattled Roman Empire, Christian leaders were faced with the awkward task of reinterpreting these injunctions in a manner more suited for a continuing society.

The new Christian ethical standards did lead to some changes in Roman morality. Perhaps the most vital was a new sense of the equal moral status of all human beings. As previously noted, the Stoics had been the first to elaborate this conception, grounding equality on the common capacity to reason. For Christians, humans are equal because they are all potentially immortal and equally precious in the sight of God. This caused Christians to condemn a wide variety of practices that had been accepted by both Greek and Roman moralists. Many of these related to the taking of innocent human life: from the earliest days Christian leaders condemned abortion, infanticide, and suicide. Even killing in war was at first regarded as wrong, and soldiers converted to Christianity had refused to continue to bear arms. Once the empire became Christian, however, this was one of the inconvenient ideas that had to yield. In spite of what Jesus had said about turning the other cheek, the church leaders declared that killing in a “just war” was not a sin. The Christian condemnation of killing in gladiatorial games, on the other hand, had a more permanent effect. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, while Christian emperors continued to uphold the legality of slavery, the Christian church accepted slaves as equals, admitted them to its ceremonies, and regarded the granting of freedom to slaves as a virtuous, if not obligatory, act. This moral pressure led over several hundred years to the gradual disappearance of slavery in Europe.

The Christian contribution to improving the position of slaves can also be linked with the distinctively Christian list of virtues. Some of the virtues described by Aristotle, as, for example, greatness of soul, are quite contrary in spirit to Christian virtues such as humility. In general, it can be said that the Greeks and Romans prized independence, self-reliance, magnanimity, and worldly success. By contrast, Christians saw virtue in meekness, obedience, patience, and resignation. As the Greeks and Romans conceived virtue, a virtuous slave was almost a contradiction in terms, but for Christians there was nothing in the state of slavery that was incompatible with the highest moral character.

Augustine

Christianity began with a set of scriptures incorporating many ethical injunctions but with no ethical philosophy. The first serious attempt to provide such a philosophy was made by St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine was acquainted with a version of Plato's philosophy, and he developed the Platonic idea of the rational soul into a Christian view wherein humans are essentially souls, using their bodies as means to achieve their spiritual ends. The ultimate object remains happiness, as in Greek ethics, but Augustine saw happiness as consisting in a union of the soul with God after the body has died. It was through Augustine, therefore, that Christianity received the Platonic theme of the relative inferiority of bodily pleasures. There was, to be sure, a fundamental difference: whereas Plato saw this inferiority in terms of a comparison with the pleasures of philosophical contemplation in this world, Christians compared them unfavourably with the pleasures of spiritual existence in the next world. Moreover, Christians came to see bodily pleasures not merely as inferior but also as a positive threat to the achievement of spiritual bliss.

It was also important that Augustine could not accept the view, common to so many Greek and Roman philosophers, that philosophical reasoning was the path to wisdom and happiness. For a Christian, of course, the path had to be through love of God and faith in Jesus as the Saviour. The result was to be, for many centuries, a rejection of the use of unfettered reasoning powers in ethics.

Augustine was aware of the tension caused by the dual Christian motivations of love of God and neighbour, on the one hand, and reward and punishment in the afterlife, on the other. He came down firmly on the side of love, insisting that those who keep the moral law through fear of punishment are not really keeping it at all. But it is not ordinary human love, either, that suffices as a motivation for true Christian living. Augustine believed all men bear the burden of Adam's original sin, and so are incapable of redeeming themselves by their own efforts. Only the unmerited grace of God makes possible obedience to the “first greatest commandment” of loving God, and without such, one cannot fulfill the moral law. This view made a clear-cut distinction between Christians and pagan moralists, no matter how humble and pure the latter might be; only the former could be saved because only they could receive the blessing of divine grace. But this gain, as Augustine saw it, was purchased at the cost of denying that man is free to choose good or evil. Only Adam had this choice: he chose for all humanity, and he chose evil.

Aquinas and the moral philosophy of the Scholastics

At this point we may pass over more than 800 years in silence, for there were no major developments in ethics in the West until the rise of Scholasticism in the 12th and 13th centuries. Among the first of the significant works written during this time was a treatise on ethics by the French philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142). His importance in ethical theory lies in his emphasis on intentions. Abelard maintained, for example, that the sin of sexual wrongdoing consists not in the act of illicit sexual intercourse nor even in the desire for it, but in mentally consenting to that desire. In this he was far more modern than Augustine, with his doctrine of grace, and also more thoughtful than those who even today assert that the mere desire for what is wrong is as wrong as the act itself. Abelard saw that there is a problem in holding anyone morally responsible for the existence of mere physical desires. His ingenious solution was taken up by later medieval writers, and traces of it can still be found in modern discussions of moral responsibility.

Aristotle's ethical writings were not known to scholars in western Europe during Abelard's time. Latin translations became available only in the first half of the 13th century, and the rediscovery of Aristotle dominated later medieval philosophy. Nowhere is his influence more marked than in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), often regarded as the greatest of the Scholastic philosophers and undoubtedly the most influential, since his teachings became the semiofficial philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church. Such is the respect in which Aquinas held Aristotle that he referred to him simply as The Philosopher, and it is not too far from the truth to say that the chief aim of Aquinas' work was to reconcile Aristotle's views with Christian doctrine.

Aquinas took from Aristotle the notion of a final end, or summum bonum, at which all action is ultimately directed; and, like Aristotle, he saw this end as necessarily linked with happiness. This conception was Christianized, however, by the idea that happiness is to be found in the love of God. Thus a person seeks to know God but cannot fully succeed in this in life on earth. The reward of heaven, where one can know God, is available only to those who merit it, though even then it is given by God's grace rather than obtained by right. Short of heaven, a person can experience only a more limited form of happiness to be gained through a life of virtue and friendship, much as Aristotle had recommended.

The blend of Aristotle's teachings and Christianity is also evident in Aquinas' views about right and wrong, and how we come to know the difference between them. Aquinas is often described as advocating a “natural law” ethic, but this term is easily misunderstood. The natural law to which Aquinas referred does not require a legislator any more than do the laws of nature that govern the motions of the planets. An even more common mistake is to imagine that this conception of natural law relies on contrasting what is natural with what is artificial. Aquinas' theory of the basis of right and wrong developed rather as an alternative to the view that morality is determined simply by the arbitrary will of God. Instead of conceiving of right and wrong in this manner as something fundamentally unrelated to human goals and purposes, Aquinas saw morality as deriving from human nature and the activities that are objectively suited to it.

It is a consequence of this natural law ethic that the difference between right and wrong can be appreciated by the use of reason and reflection on experience. Christian revelation may supplement this knowledge in some respects, but even such pagan philosophers as Aristotle could understand the essentials of virtuous living. We are, however, likely to err when we apply these general principles to the particular cases that confront us in everyday life. Corrupt customs and poor moral education may obscure the messages of natural reason. Hence, societies must enact laws of their own to supplement natural law and, where necessary, to coerce those who, because of their own imperfections, are liable to do what is wrong and socially destructive.

It follows, too, that virtue and human flourishing are linked. When we do what is right, we do what is objectively suited to our true nature. Thus the promise of heaven is no mere external sanction, rewarding actions that would otherwise be indifferent to us or even against our best interests. On the contrary, Aquinas wrote that “God is not offended by us except by what we do against our own good.” Reward and punishment in the afterlife reinforce a moral law that all humans, Christian or pagan, have adequate prior reasons for following.

In arguing for his views, Aquinas was always concerned to show that he had the authority of the Scriptures or the Church Fathers on his side, but the substance of his ethical system is to a remarkable degree based on reason rather than revelation. This is strong testimony to the power of Aristotle's example. Nonetheless, Aquinas absorbed the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the Aristotelian system. His attempt to base right and wrong on human nature, in particular, invites the objection that we cannot presuppose our nature to be good. Aquinas might reply that it is good because God made it so, but this merely shifts back one step the issue of the basis of good and bad: Did God make it good in accordance with some independent standard of goodness, or would any human nature made by God be good? If we give the former answer, we need an account of the independent standard of goodness. Because this cannot—if we are to avoid circular argument—be based on human nature, it is not clear what account Aquinas could offer. If we maintain, however, that any human nature made by God would be good, we must accept that if God had made our nature such that we flourish and achieve happiness by torturing the weak and helpless among us, that would have been what we should do in order to live virtuously.

Something resembling this second option—but without the intermediate step of an appeal to human nature—was the position taken by the last of the great Scholastic philosophers, William of Ockham (c. 1285–1349?). Ockham boldly broke with much that had been taken for granted by his immediate predecessors. Fundamental to this was his rejection of the central Aristotelian idea that all things have a final end, or goal, toward which they naturally tend. He, therefore, also spurned Aquinas' attempt to base morality on human nature, and with it the idea that happiness is man's goal and closely linked with goodness. This led him to a position in stark contrast to almost all previous Western ethics. Ockham denied all standards of good and evil that are independent of God's will. What God wills is good; what God condemns is evil. That is all there is to say about the matter. This position is sometimes called a divine approbation theory, because it defines “good” as whatever is approved by God. As indicated earlier, when discussing attempts to link morality with religion, it follows from such a position that it is meaningless to describe God himself as good. It also follows that if God had willed us to torture children, it would be good to do so. As for the actual content of God's will, according to Ockham, that is not a subject for philosophy but rather a matter for revelation and faith.

The rigour and consistency of Ockham's philosophy made it for a time one of the leading schools of Scholastic thought, but eventually it was the philosophy of Aquinas that prevailed in the Roman Catholic Church. After the Reformation, however, Ockham's view exerted influence on Protestant theologians. Meanwhile, it hastened the decline of Scholastic moral philosophy because it effectively removed ethics from the sphere of reason.

Renaissance and Reformation

The revival of Classical learning and culture that began in 15th-century Italy and then slowly spread throughout Europe did not give immediate birth to any major new ethical theories. Its significance for ethics lies, rather, in a change of focus. For the first time since the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, man, not God, became the chief object of interest, and the theme was not religion but humanism—the powers, freedom, and accomplishments of human beings. This does not mean that there was a sudden conversion to atheism. Renaissance thinkers remained Christian and still considered human beings as somehow midway between the beasts and the angels. Yet, even this middle position meant that humans were special. It meant, too, a new conception of human dignity and of the importance of the individual.

Machiavelli

Although the Renaissance did not produce any outstanding moral philosophers, there is one writer whose work is of some importance in the history of ethics: the Italian author and statesman Niccolò Machiavelli. His book Il principe (1513; The Prince) offered advice to rulers as to what they must do to achieve their aims and secure their power. Its significance for ethics lies precisely in the fact that Machiavelli's advice ignores the usual ethical rules: “It is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessities of the case.” There had not been so frank a rejection of morality since the Greek Sophists. So startling is the cynicism of Machiavelli's advice that it has been suggested that Il principe was an attempt to satirize the conduct of the princely rulers of Renaissance Italy. It may be more accurate, however, to view Machiavelli as an early political scientist, concerned only with setting out what human beings are like and how power is maintained, with no intention of passing moral judgment on the state of affairs described. In any case, Il principe gained instant notoriety, and Machiavelli's name became synonymous with political cynicism and deviousness. In spite of the chorus of condemnation, the work has led to a sharper appreciation of the difference between the lofty ethical systems of the philosophers and the practical realities of political life.

The first Protestants

It was left to the 17th-century English philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes to take up the challenge of constructing an ethical system on the basis of so unflattering a view of human nature (see below). Between Machiavelli and Hobbes, however, there occurred the traumatic breakup of Western Christianity known as the Reformation. Reacting against the worldly immorality apparent in the Renaissance church, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other leaders of the new Protestantism sought to return to the pure early Christianity of the Scriptures, especially the teachings of Paul, and of the Church Fathers, with Augustine foremost among them. They were contemptuous of Aristotle (Luther called him a “buffoon”) and of non-Christian philosophers in general. Luther's standard of right and wrong was what God commands. Like William of Ockham, Luther insisted that the commands of God cannot be justified by any independent standard of goodness: good simply means what God commands. Luther did not believe these commands would be designed to satisfy human desires because he was convinced that desires are totally corrupt. In fact, he thought that human nature was totally corrupt. In any case, Luther insisted that one does not earn salvation by good works: one is justified by faith in Christ and receives salvation through divine grace.

It is apparent that if these premises are accepted, there is little scope for human reason in ethics. As a result, no moral philosophy has ever had the kind of close association with any Protestant church that, say, the philosophy of Aquinas has had with Roman Catholicism. Yet, because Protestants emphasized the capacity of the individual to read and understand the Gospels without obtaining the authoritative interpretation of the church, the ultimate outcome of the Reformation was a greater freedom to read and write independently of the church hierarchy. This made possible a new era of ethical thought.

From this time, too, distinctively national traditions of moral philosophy began to emerge; the British tradition, in particular, developed largely independently of ethics on the Continent. Accordingly, the present discussion will follow this tradition through the 19th century before returning to consider the different line of development in continental Europe.

The British tradition: from Hobbes to the Utilitarians

Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is an outstanding example of the independence of mind that became possible in Protestant countries after the Reformation. God does, to be sure, play an honourable role in Hobbes's philosophy, but it is a dispensable role. The philosophical edifice stands on its own foundations; God merely crowns the apex. Hobbes was the equal of the Greek philosophers in his readiness to develop an ethical position based only on the facts of human nature and the circumstances in which humans live; and he surpassed even Plato and Aristotle in the extent to which he sought to do this by systematic deduction from clearly set out premises.

Hobbes started with a severe view of human nature: all of man's voluntary acts are aimed at self-pleasure or self-preservation. This position is known as psychological hedonism, because it asserts that the fundamental psychological motivation is the desire for pleasure. Like later psychological hedonists, Hobbes was confronted with the objection that people often seem to act altruistically. There is a story that Hobbes was seen giving alms to a beggar outside St. Paul's Cathedral. A clergyman sought to score a point by asking Hobbes if he would have given the money, had Christ not urged giving to the poor. Hobbes replied that he gave the money because it pleased him to see the poor man pleased. The reply reveals the dilemma that always faces those who propose startling new explanations for all human actions: either the theory is flagrantly at odds with how people really behave or else it must be broadened to such an extent that it loses much of what made it so shocking in the first place.

Hobbes's account of “good” is equally devoid of religious or metaphysical premises. He defined good as “any object of desire,” and insisted that the term must be used in relation to a person—nothing is simply good of itself independently of the person who desires it. Hobbes may therefore be considered a subjectivist. If one were to say, for example, of the incident just described, “What Hobbes did was good,” this statement would not be objectively true or false. It would be good for the poor man, and, if Hobbes's reply was accurate, it would also be good for Hobbes. But if a second poor person, for instance, was jealous of the success of the first, that person could quite properly say that what Hobbes did was bad.

Remarkably, this unpromising picture of self-interested individuals who have no notion of good apart from their own desires serves as the foundation of Hobbes's account of justice and morality in his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651). Starting with the premises that humans are self-interested and the world does not provide for all their needs, Hobbes argued that in the state of nature, without civil society, there will be competition between men for wealth, security, and glory. The ensuing struggle is Hobbes's famous “war of all against all,” in which there can be no industry, commerce, or civilization, and the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The struggle occurs because each individual rationally pursues his or her own interests, but the outcome is in no one's interest.

How can this disastrous situation be ended? Not by an appeal to morality or justice; in the state of nature these ideas have no meaning. Yet, we want to survive and we can reason. Our reason leads us to seek peace if it is attainable but to continue to use all the means of war if it is not. How is peace to be obtained? Only by a social contract. We must all agree to give up our rights to attack others in return for their giving up their rights to attack us. By reasoning in order to increase our prospects for survival, we have found the solution.

We know that a social contract will solve our problems. Our reason therefore leads us to desire such an arrangement. But how is it to come about? My reason cannot tell me to accept it while others do not. Nor is Hobbes under the illusion that the mere making of a promise or contract will carry any weight. Since we are self-interested, we will keep our promises only if it is in our interest to do so. A promise that cannot be enforced is worthless. Therefore, in making the social contract, we must establish some means of enforcing it. To do this we must all hand our powers over to some other person or group of persons who will punish anyone who breaches the contract. This person or group of persons Hobbes calls the sovereign. It may be a single person, or an elected legislature, or almost any other form of government; the essence of sovereignty consists only in having sufficient power to keep the peace by punishing those who would break it. When such a sovereign—the Leviathan of his title—exists, justice becomes meaningful in that agreements or promises are necessarily kept. At the same time, each individual has adequate reason to be just, for the sovereign will ensure that those who do not keep their agreements are suitably punished.

Hobbes witnessed the turbulence and near anarchy of the English Civil Wars (1642–51) and was keenly aware of the dangers caused by disputed sovereignty. His solution was to insist that sovereignty must not be divided. Because the sovereign was appointed to enforce the social contract fundamental to peace and everything desired, it can only be rational to resist the sovereign if the sovereign directly threatens one's life. Hobbes was, in effect, a supporter of absolute sovereignty, and this has been the focus of much political discussion of his ideas. His significance for ethics, however, lies rather in his success in dealing with the subject independently of theology and of those quasi-theological or quasi-Aristotelian accounts that see the world as designed for the benefit of human beings. With this achievement, he brought ethics into the modern era.

Early intuitionists: Cudworth, More, and Clarke

There was, of course, immediate opposition to Hobbes's views. Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), one of a group known as the Cambridge Platonists, defended a position in some respects similar to that of Plato. That is to say, Cudworth believed the distinction between good and evil does not lie in human desires but is something objective and can be known by reason, just as the truths of mathematics can be known by reason. Cudworth was thus a forerunner of what has since come to be called intuitionism, the view that there are objective moral truths that can be known by a kind of rational intuition. This view was to attract the support of a line of distinguished thinkers until the 20th century when it became for a time the dominant view in British academic philosophy.

Henry More (1614–87), another leading member of the Cambridge Platonists, attempted to give effect to the comparison between mathematics and morality by listing moral axioms that can be seen as self-evidently true, just as the axioms of geometry are seen to be self-evident. In marked contrast to Hobbes, More included an axiom of benevolence: “If it be good that one man should be supplied with the means of living well and happily, it is mathematically certain that it is doubly good that two should be so supplied, and so on.” Here, More was attempting to build on something that Hobbes himself accepted—namely, our own desire to be supplied with the means of living well. More, however, wanted to enlist reason to lead us beyond this narrow egoism to a universal benevolence. There are traces of this line of thought in the Stoics, but it was More who introduced it into British ethical thinking, wherein it is still very much alive.

Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), the next major intuitionist, accepted More's axiom of benevolence in slightly different words. He was also responsible for a principle of equity, which, though derived from the Golden Rule so widespread in ancient ethics, was formulated with a new precision: “Whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me, that by the same judgment I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in the like case should do for him.” As for the means by which these moral truths are known, Clarke accepted Cudworth's and More's analogy with truths of mathematics and added the idea that what human reason discerns is a certain “fitness or unfitness” about the relationship between circumstances and actions. The right action in a given set of circumstances is the fitting one; the wrong action is unfitting. This is something known intuitively; it is self-evident.

Clarke's notion of fitness is obscure, but intuitionism faces a still more serious problem that has always been a barrier to its acceptance. Suppose we accept the ability of reason to discern that it would be wrong to deceive a person in order to profit from the deception. Why should our discerning this truth provide us with a motive sufficient to override our desire to profit? The intuitionist position divorces our moral knowledge from the forces that motivate us. The former is a matter of reason, the latter of desire.

The punitive power of Hobbes's sovereign is, of course, one way to provide sufficient motivation for obedience to the social contract and to the laws decreed by the sovereign as necessary for the peaceful functioning of society. The intuitionists, however, wanted to show that morality is objective and holds in all circumstances whether there is a sovereign or not. Reward and punishment in the afterlife, administered by an all-powerful God, would provide a more universal motive; and some intuitionists, such as Clarke, did make use of this divine sanction. Other thinkers, however, wanted to show that it is reasonable to do what is good independently of the threats of any external power, human or divine. This desire lay behind the development of the major alternative to intuitionism in 17th- and 18th-century British moral philosophy: moral sense theory. The debate between the intuitionist and moral sense schools of thought aired for the first time the major issue in what is still the central debate in moral philosophy: Is morality based on reason or on feelings?

Shaftesbury and the moral sense school

The term moral sense was first used by the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), whose writings reflect the optimistic tone both of the school of thought he founded and of so much of the philosophy of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Shaftesbury believed that Hobbes had erred by presenting a one-sided picture of human nature. Selfishness is not the only natural passion. We also have natural feelings directed to others: benevolence, generosity, sympathy, gratitude, and so on. These feelings give us an “affection for virtue,” which leads us to promote the public interest. Shaftesbury called this affection the moral sense, and he thought it created a natural harmony between virtue and self-interest. Shaftesbury was, of course, realistic enough to acknowledge that we also have contrary desires and that not all of us are virtuous all of the time. Virtue could, however, be recommended because—and here Shaftesbury picked up a theme of Greek ethics—the pleasures of virtue are superior to the pleasures of vice.

Butler on self-interest and conscience

Joseph Butler (1692–1752), a bishop of the Church of England, developed Shaftesbury's position in two ways. He strengthened the case for a harmony between morality and enlightened self-interest by claiming that happiness occurs as a by-product of the satisfaction of desires for things other than happiness itself. Those who aim directly at happiness do not find it; those who have their goals elsewhere are more likely to achieve happiness as well. Butler was not doubting the reasonableness of pursuing one's own happiness as an ultimate aim. He went so far as to say that “ . . . when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or at least not contrary to it.” He held, however, that direct and simple egoism is a self-defeating strategy. Egoists will do better for themselves by adopting immediate goals other than their own interests and living their everyday life in accordance with these more immediate goals.

Butler's second addition to Shaftesbury's account was the idea of conscience. This he saw as a second natural guide to conduct, alongside enlightened self-interest. Butler believed that there is no inconsistency between the two; he admitted, however, that skeptics may doubt “the happy tendency of virtue” and for them conscience can serve as an authoritative guide. Just what reason these skeptics have to follow conscience, if they believe its guidance to be contrary to their own happiness, is something that Butler did not adequately explain. Nevertheless, his introduction of conscience as an independent source of moral reasoning reflects an important difference between ancient and modern ethical thinking. The Greek and Roman philosophers would have had no difficulty in accepting everything Butler said about the pursuit of happiness, but they would not have understood his idea of another independent source of rational guidance. Although Butler insisted that the two operate in harmony, this was for him a fortunate fact about the world and not a necessary principle of reason. Thus his recognition of conscience opened the way for later formulations of a universal principle of conduct at odds with the path indicated by even the most enlightened self-interested reasoning.

The climax of moral sense theory: Hutcheson and Hume

The moral sense school reached its fullest development in the works of two Scottish philosophers, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and David Hume (1711–76). Hutcheson was concerned with showing, against the intuitionists, that moral judgment cannot be based on reason and therefore must be a matter of whether an action is “amiable or disagreeable” to one's moral sense. Like Butler's notion of conscience, Hutcheson's moral sense does not find pleasing only, or even predominantly, those actions that are in one's own interest. On the contrary, Hutcheson conceived moral sense as based on a disinterested benevolence. This led him to state, as the ultimate criterion of the goodness of an action, a principle that was to serve as the basis for the Utilitarian reformers: “that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers . . . .”

Hume, like Hutcheson, held that reason cannot be the basis of morality. His chief ground for this conclusion was that morality is essentially practical: there is no point in judging something good if the judgment does not incline us to act accordingly. Reason alone, however, Hume regarded as “the slave of the passions.” Reason can show us how best to achieve our ends, but it cannot determine our ultimate desires and is incapable of moving us to action except in accordance with some prior want or desire. Hence, reason cannot give rise to moral judgments.

This is an important argument that is still employed in the debate between those who believe that morality is based on reason and those who base it instead on emotion or feelings. Hume's conclusion certainly follows from his premises. Can either premise be denied? We have seen that intuitionists such as Cudworth and Clarke maintained that reason can lead to action. Reason, they would have said, leads us to see a particular action as fitting in given circumstances and therefore to do it. Hume would have none of this. “Tis not contrary to reason,” he provocatively asserted, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” To show that he was not embracing the view that only egoism is rational, Hume continued: “Tis not contrary to reason to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me.” His point was simply that to have these preferences is to have certain desires or feelings; they are not matters of reason at all. The intuitionists might insist that moral and mathematical reasoning are analogous, but this analogy was not helpful here. We can know a truth of geometry and not be motivated to act in any way.

What of Hume's other premise that morality is essentially practical and moral judgments must lead to action? This can be denied more easily. We could say that moral judgments merely tell us what is right or wrong. They do not lead to action unless we want to do what is right. Then Hume's argument would do nothing to undermine the claim that moral judgments are based on reason. But there is a price to pay. The terms right and wrong lose much of their force. We can no longer assert that those who know what is right but do what is wrong are in any way irrational. They are just people who do not happen to have the desire to do what is right. This desire—because it leads to action—must be acknowledged to be based on feeling rather than reason. Denying that morality is necessarily action-guiding means abandoning the idea, so important to those defending the objectivity of morality, that some things are objectively required of all rational beings.

Hume's forceful presentation of this argument against a rational basis for morality would have been enough to earn him a place in the history of ethics, but it is by no means his only achievement in this field. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) Hume points, almost as an afterthought, to the fact that writers on morality regularly start by making various observations about human nature or about the existence of a god—all statements of fact about what is the case—and then suddenly switch to statements about what ought or ought not be done. Hume says that he cannot conceive how this new relationship of “ought” can be deduced from the preceding statements that were related by “is”; and he suggests these authors should explain how this deduction is to be achieved. The point has since been called Hume's Law and taken as proof of the existence of a gulf between facts and values, or between “is” and “ought.” This places too much weight on Hume's brief and ironic comment, but there is no doubt that many writers, both before and after Hume, have argued as if values could easily be deduced from facts. They can usually be found to have smuggled values in somewhere. Attention to Hume's Law makes it easy for us to detect such logically illicit contraband.

Hume's positive account of morality is in line with that of the moral sense school: “The hypothesis which we embrace is plain. It maintains that morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary.” In other words, Hume takes moral judgments to be based on a feeling. They do not reflect any objective state of the world. Having said that, however, it may still be asked whether this feeling is one that is common to all of us or one that varies from individual to individual. If Hume gives the former answer, moral judgments retain a kind of objectivity. While they do not reflect anything out there in the universe apart from human feelings, one's judgments may be true or false depending on whether they capture this universal human moral sentiment. If, on the other hand, the feeling varies from one individual to the next, moral judgments become entirely subjective. People's judgments would express their own feelings, and to reject someone else's judgment as wrong would merely be to say that one's own feelings were different.

Hume does not make entirely clear which of these two views he holds; but if he is to avoid breaching his own rule about not deducing an “ought” from an “is,” he cannot hold that a moral judgment can follow logically from a description of the feelings that an action gives to a particular group of spectators. From the mere existence of a feeling we cannot draw the inference that we ought to obey it. For Hume to be consistent on this point—and even with his central argument that moral judgments must move to action—the moral judgment must be based not on the fact that all people, or most people, or even the speaker, have a certain feeling; it must rather be based on the actual experience of the feeling by whoever accepts the judgment. This still leaves it open whether the feeling is common to all or limited to the person accepting the judgment, but it shows that, in either case, the “truth” of a judgment for any individual depends on whether that individual actually has the appropriate feeling. Is this “truth” at all? As will be seen below, 20th-century philosophers with views broadly similar to Hume's have suggested that moral judgments have a special kind of meaning not susceptible of truth or falsity in the ordinary way.

The intuitionist response: Price and Reid

Powerful as they were, Hume's arguments did not end the debate between the moral sense theorists and the intuitionists. They did, however, lead Richard Price (1723–91), Thomas Reid (1710–96), and later intuitionists to abandon the idea that moral truths can be established by some process of demonstrative reasoning akin to that used in mathematics. Instead, these proponents of intuitionism took the line that our notions of right and wrong are simple, objective ideas, directly perceived by us and not further analyzable into anything such as “fitness.” We know of these ideas, not through any moral sense based on feelings, but rather through a faculty of reason or of the intellect that is capable of discerning truth. Since Hume, this has been the only plausible form of intuitionism. Yet, Price and Reid failed to explain adequately just what are the objective moral qualities that we perceive directly and how they connect with the actions we choose.

Utilitarianism

At this point the argument over whether morality is based on reason or feelings was temporarily exhausted, and the focus of British ethics shifted from such questions about the nature of morality as a whole to an inquiry into which actions are right and which are wrong. Today, the distinction between these two types of inquiry would be expressed by saying that whereas the 18th-century debate between intuitionism and the moral sense school dealt with questions of metaethics, 19th-century thinkers became chiefly concerned with questions of normative ethics. The positions we take in metaethics over whether ethics is objective or subjective, for example, do not tell us what we ought to do. That task is the province of normative ethics.

Paley

The impetus to the discussion of normative ethics was provided by the challenge of Utilitarianism. The essential principle of Utilitarianism was, as noted above, put forth by Hutcheson. Curiously, it gained further development from the widely read theologian William Paley (1743–1805), who provides a good example of the independence of metaethics and normative ethics. His position on the nature of morality was similar to that of Ockham and Luther—namely, he held that right and wrong are determined by the will of God. Yet, because he believed that God wills the happiness of his creatures, his normative ethics were Utilitarian: whatever increases happiness is right; whatever diminishes it is wrong.

Bentham

Notwithstanding these predecessors, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is properly considered the father of modern Utilitarianism. It was he who made the Utilitarian principle serve as the basis for a unified and comprehensive ethical system that applies, in theory at least, to every area of life. Never before had a complete, detailed system of ethics been so consistently constructed from a single fundamental ethical principle.

Bentham's ethics began with the proposition that nature has placed human beings under two masters: pleasure and pain. Anything that seems good must either be directly pleasurable, or thought to be a means to pleasure or to the avoidance of pain. Conversely, anything that seems bad must either be directly painful, or thought to be a means to pain or to the deprivation of pleasure. From this Bentham argued that the words right and wrong can only be meaningful if they are used in accordance with the Utilitarian principle, so that whatever increases the net surplus of pleasure over pain is right and whatever decreases it is wrong.

Bentham then set out how we are to weigh the consequences of an action, and thereby decide whether it is right or wrong. We must, he says, take account of the pleasures and pains of everyone affected by the action, and this is to be done on an equal basis: “Each to count for one, and none for more than one.” (At a time when Britain had a major trade in slaves, this was a radical suggestion; and Bentham went further still, explicitly extending consideration to nonhuman animals as well.) We must also consider how certain or uncertain the pleasures and pains are, their intensity, how long they last, and whether they tend to give rise to further feelings of the same or of the opposite kind.

Bentham did not allow for distinctions in the quality of pleasure or pain as such. Referring to a popular game, he affirmed that “quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.” This led his opponents to characterize his philosophy as one fit for pigs. The charge is only half true. Bentham could have defended a taste for poetry on the grounds that whereas one tires of mere games, the pleasures of a true appreciation of poetry have no limit; thus the quantities of pleasure obtained by poetry are greater than those obtained by pushpin. All the same, one of the strengths of Bentham's position is its honest bluntness, which it owes to his refusal to be fazed by the contrary opinions either of conventional morality or of refined society. He never thought that the aim of Utilitarianism was to explain or justify ordinary moral views; it was, rather, to reform them.

Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806–73), Bentham's successor as the leader of the Utilitarians and the most influential British thinker of the 19th century, had some sympathy for the view that Bentham's position was too narrow and crude. His essay “Utilitarianism” (1861) introduced several modifications, all aimed at a broader view of what is worthwhile in human existence and at implications less shocking to established moral convictions. Although his position was based on the maximization of happiness (and this is said to consist in pleasure and the absence of pain), he distinguished between pleasures that are higher and those that are lower in quality. This enabled him to say that it is “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” The fool, he argued, would only be of a different opinion because he did not know both sides of the question.

Mill sought to show that Utilitarianism is compatible with moral rules and principles relating to justice, honesty, and truthfulness by arguing that Utilitarians should not attempt to calculate before each action whether that specific action will maximize utility. Instead, they should be guided by the fact that an action falls under a general principle (such as the principle that we should keep our promises), and adherence to that general principle tends to increase happiness. Only under special circumstances is it necessary to consider whether an exception may have to be made.

Sidgwick

Mill's easily readable prose ensured a wide audience for his exposition of Utilitarianism, but as a philosopher he was markedly inferior to the last of the 19th-century Utilitarians, Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900). Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (1874) is the most detailed and subtle work of Utilitarian ethics yet produced. Especially noteworthy is his discussion of the various principles accepted by what he calls common sense morality—i.e., the morality accepted by most people without systematic thought. Price, Reid, and some adherents of their brand of intuitionism thought that such principles (e.g., those of truthfulness, justice, honesty, benevolence, purity, and gratitude) were self-evident, independent moral truths. Sidgwick was himself an intuitionist as far as the basis of ethics was concerned: he believed that the principle of Utilitarianism must ultimately be based on a self-evident axiom of rational benevolence. Nonetheless, he strongly rejected the view that all principles of common sense morality are themselves self-evident. He went on to demonstrate that the allegedly self-evident principles conflict with one another and are vague in their application. They could only be part of a coherent system of morality, he argued, if they were regarded as subordinate to the Utilitarian principle, which defined their application and resolved the conflicts between them.

Sidgwick was satisfied that he had reconciled common sense morality and Utilitarianism by showing that whatever was sound in the former could be accounted for by the latter. He was, however, troubled by his inability to achieve any such reconciliation between Utilitarianism and egoism, the third method of ethical reasoning dealt with in his book. True, Sidgwick regarded it as self-evident that “from the point of view of the universe” one's own good is of no greater value than the like good of any other person, but what could be said to the egoist who expresses no concern for the point of view of the universe, taking his stand instead on the fact that his own good mattered more to him than anyone else's? Bentham had apparently believed either that self-interest and the general happiness are not at odds or that it is the legislator's task to reward or punish actions so as to see that they are not. Mill also had written of the need for sanctions but was more concerned with the role of education in shaping human nature in such a way that one finds happiness in doing what benefits all. By contrast, Sidgwick was convinced that this could lead at best to a partial overlap between what is in one's own interest and what is in the interest of all. Hence, he searched for arguments with which to convince the egoist of the rationality of universal benevolence but failed to find any. The Methods of Ethics concludes with an honest admission of this failure and an expression of dismay at the fact that, as a result, “. . . it would seem necessary to abandon the idea of rationalizing [morality] completely.”

The continental tradition: from Spinoza to Nietzsche

Spinoza

If Hobbes is to be regarded as the first of a distinctively British philosophical tradition, the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632–77) appropriately occupies the same position in continental Europe. Unlike Hobbes, Spinoza did not provoke a long-running philosophical debate. In fact, his philosophy was neglected for a century after his death and was in any case too much of a self-contained system to invite debate. Nevertheless, Spinoza held positions on crucial issues thatwere in sharp contrast to those taken by Hobbes, and these differences were to grow over the centuries during which British and continental European philosophy followed their own paths.

The first of these contrasts with Hobbes is Spinoza's attitude toward natural desires. As has been noted, Hobbes took self-interested desire for pleasure as an unchangeable fact about human nature and proceeded to build a moral and political system to cope with it. Spinoza did just the opposite. He saw natural desires as a form of bondage. We do not choose to have them of our own will. Our will cannot be free if it is subject to forces outside itself. Thus our real interests lie not in satisfying these desires but in transforming them by the application of reason. Spinoza thus stands in opposition not only to Hobbes but also to the position later to be taken by Hume, for Spinoza saw reason not as the slave of the passions but as their master.

The second important contrast is that while individual humans and their separate interests are always assumed in Hobbes's philosophy, this separation is simply an illusion from Spinoza's viewpoint. Everything that exists is part of a single system, which is at the same time nature and God. (One possible interpretation of this is that Spinoza was a pantheist, believing that God exists in every aspect of the world and not apart from it.) We, too, are part of this system and are subject to its rationally necessary laws. Once we know this, we understand how irrational it would be to desire that things should be different from the way they are. This means that it is irrational to envy, to hate, and to feel guilt, for these emotions presuppose the possibility of things being different. So we cease to feel such emotions and find peace, happiness, and even freedom—in Spinoza's terms the only freedom there can be—in understanding the system of which we are a part.

A view of the wor