Ethical Theory

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Excerpt from Ethical Theory: From Hobbes to Kant The problems of elementary ethics as a branch of philosophy tend to remain much the same over the centuries. The philosophers from Hobbes to Kant, whose views are to be analyzed and commented upon in this study, deal with a set of problems thoroughly familiar to teachers of ethics today. In the background there is the basic division between those who may be called naturalists and those who feel that morals must have a grounding in the realms of the transcendent. Neither Hobbes, Spinoza nor Hume literally denied the existence of God, but now, in a classification of systems, they are appropriately put with the naturalists, since, in one way or another, the concept of God has for them shifted its meaning. The others obviously accepted some form of traditional theism. Locke formulated ethics in terms of egoism and a God who sees men in the dark. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson established the existence of disinterested benevolence by considerations which have continued to be generally accepted down to the present day. Cudworth, Clarke, Balguy and Price state impressively the classic theory that we apprehend an eternal and immutable moral law by means of reason. Hutcheson propounded, with clarity, the theory of a moral sense, which causes us to approve of actions seemingly tending to the greatest good of the greatest number. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.