Moral - Modern Philosophy - Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Bibliography
law ethics theories natural
The moral philosophy of the modern period traditionally included ethics as well as natural-law theories of rights and the normative foundations of state authority. Nowadays, the term moral philosophy tends to be used mainly with reference to ethics proper, while modern natural-law theories and their history are often treated under the headings of political philosophy and philosophy of law. In keeping with this convention, the following summaries concentrate mainly on developments in ethics since 1600.
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Modern Western philosophy emerged in conjunction with the religious, political, and social upheavals that characterized the Reformation period and the first half of the seventeenth century. Early modern moral philosophy reflected the need to reassess the ways that European thinkers had viewed moral knowledge, the human good and the nature of moral value, and the relation between God's will …
A characteristic component of eighteenth-century sentimentalist ethics was the rejection of the rationalist accounts of
moral knowledge and motivation that supported theoretical views like those just summarized. Sentimentalist thinkers held that our awareness of moral good and evil, our ability to judge actions and character traits, and our motives for action depend on our capacity to be affected…
Kant's theory of autonomy and his treatments of the universal principles of rational willing were of determinative significance for the idealist philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Yet Hegel considered the Kantian method of grounding ethics strictly in the analysis of the formal aspects of rational self-legislation to be fundamentally incomplete. According to Heg…
Offering an alternative to neo-Kantian ethics and prevalent strains of utilitarian ethics, the emergence of systematic value theory represented an important trend in German and Austrian academic philosophy during the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. The pivotal thinkers in this regard, Franz Brentano (1838–1917) and Max Scheler (1874–1928), held…
Becker Lawrence C., and Charlotte B. Becker, eds. Encyclopedia of Ethics. 2nd ed. 3 vols. New York: Routledge, 2001. Darwall, Stephen, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, eds. Moral Discourse and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Keohane, N…
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