A Short History of Ethics

Alasdair Macintyre

Description

A Short History of Ethics is a significant contribution written by one of the most important living philosophers. For the second edition Alasdair MacIntyre has included a new preface in which he examines his book “thirty years on” and considers its impact. It remains an important work, ideal for all students interested in ethics and morality.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• 20th Century
• HISTORY
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Morality
• Historiography
• Religion
• Homer

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268161286
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

A SHORT HISTORY OF ETHICS
A Short History of Ethics has over the past thirty years become a key philosophical contribution to the study of morality and ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre guides the reader through the history of moral philosophy from the Greeks to contemporary times. He emphasizes the importance of a historical context to moral concepts and ideas and illustrates the relevance of philosophical queries on moral concepts, thus enabling the reader to understand the importance of a historical account of ethics.
For the second edition Alasdair MacIntyre has added a new preface in which he looks at the book thirty years on and considers both its critics and its impact.
A Short History of Ethics is a significant work written by one of the most important living philosophers and is ideal for all students interested in ethics and morality.
Alasdair MacIntyre is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. His published works include Against the Self-Images of the Age, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry , and After Virtue .
A SHORT HISTORY OF
Ethics
A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century
Second edition
Alasdair MacIntyre
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS NOTRE DAME, INDIANA
Copyright 1996, 1998 by Alasdair MacIntyre
Paperback published in the United States in 1998 by
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, IN 46556
and in Great Britain in 1998
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Reprinted in 2000, 2002
First published in 1966 by
Macmillan Publishing Company, a division of Macmillan, Inc.
866 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022
Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
MacIntyre, Alasdair C.
A short history of ethics / Alasdair MacIntyre.
p. c.m.
Originally published: New York : Macmillan, 1996, in series: Fields of philosophy.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-268-01759-X (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Ethics-History. I. Title.
BJ71.M3 1997
170 9-dc21
97-22280
ISBN 9780268161286
This book is printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
CONTENTS
Preface
Preface to the first edition
1 The Philosophical Point of the History of Ethics
2 The Prephilosophical History of Good and the Transition to Philosophy
3 The Sophists and Socrates
4 Plato: The Gorgias
5 Plato: The Republic
6 Postscript to Plato
7 Aristotle s Ethics
8 Postscript to Greek Ethics
9 Christianity
10 Luther, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza
11 New Values
12 The British Eighteenth-Century Argument
13 The French Eighteenth-Century Argument
14 Kant
15 Hegel and Marx
16 Kierkegaard to Nietzsche
17 Reformers, Utilitarians, Idealists
18 Modern Moral Philosophy
PREFACE
A Short History of Ethics was first published in the United States by Collier Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Company, in 1966 and then in Britain by what was then Routledge Kegan Paul. It has since been translated into Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, German, Slovenian, and, most recently in 1995, into Polish. The translator of the Polish edition, Professor Adam Chmielewski, invited me to write a preface for Polish readers and I gratefully used this opportunity to consider some of the respects in which the original text needs to be corrected or modified and some of the ways in which my perspectives on the history of ethics have changed. First of all I need to note that the title is misleading: this is a short history of Western ethics, not of ethics. And I now have an opportunity to take account of the pertinent criticisms on particular issues made by others, to whom I am most grateful, and at least to recognize the fact that Western moral philosophy has continued to have a history since 1966. But I have not attempted to bring the story up to date.
My own most fundamental dissatisfactions with this book derive from changes in my own philosophical and moral standpoint. I do of course still endorse a great deal of what I then asserted. But, when I now read the story that I told then, I see it as a story in need of revision, one in a succession of genuinely instructive stories about the history of moral philosophy which have been told by philosophers-for example, Hegel s, Marx s, and Sidgwick s (although I am well aware that my work does not rank with theirs)-each of which could later be improved upon. And in my own later writings-especially After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, second edition, 1982), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990)-I have tried on various topics to improve upon A Short History of Ethics .
I am, however, conscious both of how much there is in the Short History with which I still agree and that it was only by first writing that book and then reflecting upon it that I learned how to do better. And since many contemporary readers may well find themselves more at home with the standpoint which was mine in 1966 rather than that which is now mine, it seems important still to invite readers to make the story told in the Short History their own starting-point for learning about and then reflecting upon the history of ethics. What I hope to do in this preface is to explain why I think this story needs nonetheless to be challenged. But, before I subject myself and the story that I then told to some radical questioning, I need to attend not to my own view of the overall narrative, but to the more important of the criticisms that have been leveled at the book by others.
Those criticisms have mostly concerned inadequacies in my treatments of particular authors, a type of criticism which I predicted and welcomed in advance in my original Preface. I too have become highly critical of such inadequacies, quite as much as other critics have been, in those areas where what I wrote plainly needs to be corrected or supplemented. Let me therefore try to supply something of what is needed by way of correction and supplement, noting however that just as it was an attempt to summarize large and complex theses and arguments all too briefly, which was a major source of defects and omissions in the original text, so what I have to say now will necessarily once again be compressed and perhaps too compressed. This is a difficulty that I shall be able to overcome only when I finally do write that as yet nonexistent book that I think of as A Very Long History of Ethics .
Four of the chapters where particular corrections are needed are chapter 9 on Christianity, chapter 12 on the British Eighteenth-Century Argument, chapter 14 on Kant, and chapter 18 on Modern Moral Philosophy. Let me deal with these in turn:
Chapter 9 : Christianity . This chapter is the most striking example in the book of a kind of defect which I pointed out in the Preface when I wrote that This book is inevitably the victim of the author s overnumerous intentions. Between 109 pages on Greek ethics and 149 pages on Western European ethics from the Renaissance to 1964 I sandwiched ten pages within which I attempted to identify the distinctive moral outlook of the Christian religion and to bridge the historical gap of 1300 years between Marcus Aurelius and Machiavelli and to give some account of the importance of medieval moral philosophy. What an absurdity! But it was not only my absurdity. This error of mine reflected a widespread, even if far from universal, practice in the then English-speaking world-which still unfortunately persists in numerous colleges and universities-of ignoring the place both of the earlier Christian eras and of the high middle ages in the history of philosophy. So, for example, in the then Oxford undergraduate curriculum there had been for a very long time a large place assigned to the study of ancient philosophy, and also to that of modern philosophy, but almost no place at all to medieval philosophy.
What is needed to repair my own errors and omissions is of two different kinds. First the account of Christianity which I then gave needs not only to be expanded, but to be radically revised. The core of that account imputes to distinctively Christian ethics an, as I then thought, unresolvable paradox, that it tried to devise a code for society as a whole from pronouncements originally addressed to individuals or small communities who were to separate themselves off from the rest of society in expectation of a Second Coming of Christ, which did not in fact occur (pp. 115-116). What I failed to recognize was that this paradox had already been resolved within the New Testament itself through the Pauline doctrines of the church and of the mission of the church to the world. Those doctrines successfully define a life for Christians informed both by the hope of the Second Coming and by a commitment to this-worldly activity in and through which human beings rediscover the true nature of their natural ends and of those natural virtues required to achieve those ends, as a result of coming to understand them in the light of the theological virtues identified in the New Testament. Those virtues are, on a Christian view, the qualities necessary for obedience to God s law, that obedience which constitutes community, whether it is that obedience to God s law apprehended by reason which constitutes natural community or that obedience to revelation which constitutes the church. (My earlier failure to recognize this was due to my having been overimpressed by biblical critics who falsely thought that they had discovered a large and incoherent eclecticism in the New Testament. What corrected my earlier view was in part a larger knowledge of that same criticism. I learned especially from the work of Hein