History of Ethics

Daniel Star, Roger Crisp, Daniel Star, Roger Crisp

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119235873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Is there an objective moral standard that applies to all our actions? To what extent should I sacrifice my own interests for the sake of others? How might philosophers of the past help us think about contemporary ethical problems?

As the most recent addition to the Blackwell Readings in Philosophy series, History of Ethics: Essential Readings with Commentary brings together rich and varied excerpts of canonical work and contemporary scholarship to span the history of Western moral philosophy in one volume. Editors Star and Crisp, noted scholars in their fields, expertly introduce the readings to illuminate the main philosophical ideas and arguments in each selection, and connect them to broader themes. These detailed and incisive editorial commentaries make the primary source texts accessible to students while guiding them chronologically through the history of Western ethics.

Structured around a thematic table of contents divided into three distinct sections, History of Ethics charts patterns in the development of ethical thought across time to highlight connections between intellectual movements. Selections range from the work of well-known figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Mill to the work of philosophers often overlooked by such anthologies, including Butler, Smith, Sidgwick, Anscombe, Foot, and Frankena. Star and Crisp skillfully arrange the collection to connect readings to contemporary issues and interests by featuring examples such as Aquinas on self-defense and the doctrine of double effect, Kant on virtue, and Mill's The Subjection of Women.

Written for students and scholars of ethics, History of Ethics is a comprehensive collection of readings with expert editorial commentary that curates the most important and influential work in the history of ethics in the Western world.

Part I
Ancient and Medieval Ethics

1
Gorgias and Republic: The Authority of Morality

Plato

In the excerpts from Gorgias and the Republic provided here, Plato presents us with three attempts to call morality or justice into question. The relevant Greek word, dikaiosunê, is usually translated as ‘justice’, but it is very general in scope as Plato uses it, so it might also be translated as ‘morality’. The first two attempts, presented by the sophists Callicles and Thrasymachus, are responded to immediately by Socrates – Plato’s mouthpiece throughout – who is not prepared to let them represent genuine philosophical options. He takes them to be based on a failure to genuinely appreciate the nature of the subject at hand, a failure that springs from the sophist motivation in using arguments – a sophist’s primary aim is to benefit personally by winning arguments, rather than to use arguments to get closer to the truth (in the present day, it can help to think of the differences between debating classes and philosophy classes). We should bear this in mind if at times we feel that Thrasymachus is giving in too easily to some of Socrates’s arguments. We may wonder whether Plato has been completely fair to his opponents; but, more positively, we might take it that Plato means to suggest that the other side is not even particularly good at rationally defending their own positions – they are accustomed to believing that insults and intellectual bullying will help them achieve their ends just as well, and will simply lose interest in rational argumentation when winning no longer looks likely.

Callicles and Thrasymachus put forward popular and politically potent forms of skepticism that stand in opposition to philosophy. Their approaches are different, and the responses that are required are thus also different: Callicles distinguishes between morality as an artifice designed to protect the weak, and natural justice, which, he takes it, directs the strong to dominate the weak (comparisons with Nietzsche are sometimes made by contemporary scholars), whereas Thrasymachus argues that it is good for the strong to dominate the weak. The first position is countered with arguments that challenge the claims about what is natural and what is conventional, whereas the second position is seen to be in need of a response that takes off from noting how strange it is to suppose that justice is bad and injustice good. The short excerpt from Gorgias is provided for the sake of contrast (and only the first part of Socrates’s response is provided), but the student may particularly benefit from focusing on three of the arguments that Socrates uses against Thrasymachus: (i) from ‘…I cannot hear without amazement that you class injustice with wisdom and virtue, and justice with the opposite’ (348 E) onwards; (ii) from ‘You would not deny that a state may be unjust and may be unjustly trying to enslave other states…?’ (351 B) onwards; and (iii) from ‘…whether the just have a better and happier life than the unjust is a further question which we also proposed to consider’ (352 D) onwards.

The third of our three challenges is not responded to in as direct or immediate a manner, but Plato sets it out extremely well. It is presented by Glaucon, who, unlike Callicles and Thrasymachus, is genuinely respectful of Socrates. Glaucon is not so much committed to a form of skepticism as seriously worried by what he takes to be the strongest form of moral skepticism he can think of, and he hopes that Socrates can free him of his concerns. Glaucon provides us with some wonderful thought experiments that seem to suggest self‐interest and morality can irretrievably come apart – there is the story of the Ring of Gyges (which is likely to remind the contemporary reader of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings). But perhaps even more important are the thought experiments that follow it, where we are asked to imagine a moral person whose every action is misinterpreted by others as immoral and who therefore will only ever meet with punishment and derision when acting morally; and an immoral person whose every immoral act is met with rewards and praise.

Glaucon is asking us to fix our minds on the question, do I always have overwhelming reasons to be moral? The challenge provided by Glaucon’s thought experiments is simply one that asks how morality could be such that we each have reasons to follow it even when it appears to conflict with self‐interest. Plato recognizes that this challenge is a serious one, and one can read the remainder of the Republic as an attempt to answer it.

In order to answer Glaucon’s challenge, Plato’s Socrates first says that it will be necessary to provide a detailed account of morality or justice in individual persons (in other words, an account of the moral or just individual). Plato recognizes that there may be different routes to understanding the nature of morality (in the third excerpt in this book, we will see Plato mentioning a ‘longer and more circuitous’ route); but the one that he thinks it is best to follow in the Republic involves our first looking to ascertain what morality or justice consists of on the level of the ideal community, since this may be easier to ascertain than it would be if we began by first looking at the individual. After we have done this, we can return to morality on the level of the individual with a clearer sense of what we are looking for.

Gorgias

[…]

483

484

CALLICLES. The truth is, Socrates, that you, who pretend to be engaged in the pursuit of truth, are appealing now to the popular and vulgar notions of right, which are not natural, but only conventional. Custom and nature are generally at variance with one another: and hence, if a person is too modest to say what he thinks, he is compelled to contradict himself; and you, ingeniously seeing the advantage which may be won from this, dishonestly contrive that when a person speaks according to this rule of custom, you slyly ask him a question, which is to be referred to the rule of nature; and if he is talking of the rule of nature, you slip away to custom: as in this very discussion about doing and suffering injustice, when Polus was speaking of the conventionally dishonorable, you pursued his notion of convention from the point of view of nature; for by the rule of nature, that only is the more disgraceful which is the greater evil – as, for example, to suffer injustice; but by the rule of custom, to do evil is the more disgraceful. For this suffering of injustice is not the part of a man, but of a slave, who indeed had better die than live; for when he is wronged and trampled upon, he is unable to help himself, or any other about whom he cares. The reason, as I conceive, is that the makers of laws are the many weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the mightier sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say, that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning, when they speak of injustice, the desire to have more than their neighbors, for knowing their own inferiority they are only too glad of equality. And therefore this seeking to have more than the many, is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice, wher...