A Short History of Ethics

A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the 20th Century

Alasdair MacIntyre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134688272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A Short History of Ethics has over the past thirty years become a key philosophical contribution to studies on morality and ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre writes a new preface for this second edition which looks at the book 'thirty years on' and considers its impact. A Short History of Ethics guides the reader through the history of moral philosophy from the Greeks to contemporary times. MacIntyre emphasises the importance of a historical context to moral concepts and ideas showing the relevance of philosophical queries on moral concepts and the importance of a historical account of ethics.
A Short History of Ethics is an important contribution written by one of the most important living philosophers. Ideal for all philosophy students interested in ethics and morality.

CHAPTER 1 THE PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF THE HISTORY OF ETHICS

MORAL PHILOSOPHY is often written as though the history of the subject were only of secondary and incidental importance. This attitude seems to be the outcome of a belief that moral concepts can be examined and understood apart from their history. Some philosophers have even written as if moral concepts were a timeless, limited, unchanging, determinate species of concept, necessarily having the same features throughout their history, so that there is a part of language waiting to be philosophically investigated which deserves the title “the language of morals” (with a definite article and a singular noun). In a less sophisticated way, historians of morals are all too apt to allow that moral practices and the content of moral judgments may vary from society to society and from person to person, but at the same time these historians have subtly assimilated different moral concepts–and so they end up by suggesting that although what is held to be right or good is not always the same, roughly the same concepts of right and good are universal.

In fact, of course, moral concepts change as social life changes. I deliberately do not write “because social life changes,” for this might suggest that social life is one thing, morality another, and that there is merely an external, contingent causal relationship between them. This is obviously false. Moral concepts are embodied in and are partially constitutive of forms of social life. One key way in which we may identify one form of social life as distinct from another is by identifying differences in moral concepts. So it is an elementary commonplace to point out that there is no precise English equivalent for the Greek word δικαιοσ□νη, usually translated justice. And this is not a mere linguistic defect, so that what Greek achieves by a single word English needs a periphrasis to achieve. It is rather that the occurrence of certain concepts in ancient Greek discourse and of others in modern English marks a difference between two forms of social life. To understand a concept, to grasp the meaning of the words which express it, is always at least to learn what the rules are which govern the use of such words and so to grasp the role of the concept in language and social life. This in itself would suggest strongly that different forms of social life will provide different roles for concepts to play. Or at least for some concepts this seems likely to be the case. There certainly are concepts which are unchanging over long periods, and which must be unchanging for one of two reasons. Either they are highly specialized concepts belonging within stable and continuing disciplines, such as geometry; or else they are highly general concepts necessary to any language of any complexity. I have in mind here the family of concepts expressed by such words as and, or, and if. But moral concepts do not fall into either of these two classes.

So it would be a fatal mistake to write as if, in the history of moral philosophy, there had been one single task of analyzing the concept of, for example, justice, to the performance of which Plato, Hobbes, and Bentham all set themselves, and for their achievement at which they can be awarded higher or lower marks. It does not of course follow, and it is in fact untrue, that what Plato says about δικαιοσ□νη and what Hobbes or Bentham says about justice are totally irrelevant to one another. There are continuities as well as breaks in the history of moral concepts. Just here lies the complexity of the history.

The complexity is increased because philosophical inquiry itself plays a part in changing moral concepts. It is not that we have first a straightforward history of moral concepts and then a separate and secondary history of philosophical comment. For to analyze a concept philosophically may often be to assist in its transformation by suggesting that it needs revision, or that it is discredited in some way, or that it has a certain kind of prestige. Philosophy leaves everything as it is–except concepts. And since to possess a concept involves behaving or being able to behave in certain ways in certain circumstances, to alter concepts, whether by modifying existing concepts or by making new concepts available or by destroying old ones, is to alter behavior. So the Athenians who condemned Socrates to death, the English parliament which condemned Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1666, and the Nazis who burned philosophical books were correct at least in their apprehension that philosophy can be subversive of established ways of behaving. Understanding the world of morality and changing it are far from incompatible tasks. The moral concepts which are objects for analysis to the philosophers of one age may sometimes be what they are partly because of the discussions by philosophers of a previous age.

A history which takes this point seriously, which is concerned with the role of philosophy in relation to actual conduct, cannot be philosophically neutral. For it cannot but be at odds with the view of all those recent philosophers who have wanted sharply to distinguish philosophical ethics as a second-order activity of comment from the first-order discourse which is part of the conduct of life, where moral utterances themselves are in place. In drawing this distinction such philosophers have tried so to define the realm of philosophy that it would be a conceptual truth that philosophy could not impinge upon practice. A. J. Ayer, for instance, has written about one particular ethical theory that it “… is entirely on the level of analysis; it is an attempt to show what people are doing when they make moral judgments; it is not a set of suggestions as to what moral judgments they are to make. And this is true of all moral philosophy as I understand it. All moral theories … in so far as they are philosophical theories, are neutral as regards actual conduct.”¹

My quarrel with this view will emerge from time to time in these essays. But what I hope will emerge even more clearly is the function of history in relation to conceptual analysis, for it is here that Santayana’s epigram that he who is ignorant of the history of philosophy is doomed to repeat it finds its point. It is all too easy for philosophical analysis, divorced from historical inquiry, to insulate itself from correction. In ethics it can happen in the following way. A certain unsystematically selected class of moral concepts and judgments is made the subject of attention. From the study of these it is concluded that specifically moral discourse possesses certain characteristics. When counterexamples are adduced to show that this is not always so, these counterexamples are dismissed as irrelevant, because not examples of moral discourse; and they are shown to be nonmoral by exhibiting their lack of the necessary characteristics. From this kind of circularity we can be saved only by an adequate historical view of the varieties of moral and evaluative discourse. This is why it would be dangerous, and not just pointless, to begin these studies with a definition which would carefully delimit the field of inquiry. We cannot, of course, completely avoid viewing past moralists and past philosophers in terms of present distinctions. To set out to write the history of moral philosophy at all involves us in selecting from the past what falls under the heading of moral philosophy as we now conceive it. But it is important that we should, as far as it is possible, allow the history of philosophy to break down our present-day preconceptions, so that our too narrow views of what can and cannot be thought, said, and done are discarded in face of the record of what has been thought, said, and done. We have to steer between the danger of a dead antiquarianism, which enjoys the illusion that we can approach the past without preconceptions, and that other danger, so apparent in such philosophical historians as Aristotle and Hegel, of believing that the whole point of the past was that it should culminate with us. History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.

CHAPTER 2
THE PREPHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY OF “GOOD” AND THE TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY

THE SUGGESTION that asking and answering moral questions is one thing, and asking and answering philosophical questions about morality quite another thing, may conceal from us the fact that in asking moral questions of a certain kind with sufficient persistence we may discover that we cannot answer them until we have asked and answered certain philosophical questions. A discovery of this kind provided the initial impulse for philosophical ethics in Greek society. For at a certain period, when moral questions were asked, it became clear that the meaning of some of the key words involved in the framing of those questions was no longer clear and unambiguous. Social changes had not only made certain types of conduct, once socially accepted, problematic, but had also rendered problematic the concepts which had defined the moral framework of an earlier world. The social changes in question are those reflected in Greek literature in the transition from the Homeric writers through the Theognid corpus to the sophists.

The society reflected in the Homeric poems is one in which the most important judgments that can be passed upon a man concern the way in which he discharges his allotted social function. It is because certain qualities are necessary to discharge the function of a king or a warrior, a judge or a shepherd, that there is a use for such expressions as authoritative and courageous and just. The word □γαθ□ς, ancestor of our good, is originally a predicate specifically attached to the role of a Homeric nobleman. “To be agathos,” says W. H. Adkins, “one must be brave, skilful and successful in war and in peace; and one must possess the wealth and (in peace) the leisure which are at once the necessary conditions for the development of these skills and the natural reward of their successful employment.”² □γαθ□ς is not like our word good in many of its Homeric contexts, for it is not used to say that it is “good” to be kingly, courageous, and clever–that is, it is not used to commend these qualities in a man, as our word good might be used by a contemporary admirer of the Homeric ideal. It is rather that □γαθ□ς is a commendatory word because it is interchangeable with the words which characterize the qualities of the Homeric ideal. So in our ordinary English use of good, “good, but not kingly, courageous, or cunning” makes perfectly good sense; but in Homer, “□γαθ□ς, but not kingly, courageous, or clever” would not even be a morally eccentric form of judgment, but as it stands simply an unintelligible contradiction.

How do adjectives of appraisal, such as □γαθ□ς and others, function in Homer? First of all, to ascribe the qualities for which they stand to someone is to make a factual statement, in the sense that whether what you have said is true or false is settled by the man’s performances and settled simply and solely by his performances. The question, Is he □γαθ□ς? is the same as the question, Is he courageous, clever, and kingly? And this is answered by answering the question, Does he, and has he, fought, plotted, and ruled with success? The point of such ascriptions is in part predictive. To call a man □γαθ□ς is to tell your hearers what sort of conduct they can expect from him. We ascribe dispositions to the agent in the light of his behavior in past episodes.

From this alone it is strikingly plain that the Homeric use of □γαθ□ς does not square at all with what many recent philosophers have thought to be the characteristic properties of moral, and indeed of evaluative, predicates. For it has often been held³ to be an essential feature of such predicates that any judgments in which one is ascribed to a subject cannot follow logically as a conclusion from premises which are merely factual. No matter what factual conditions are satisfied, these by themselves can never provide sufficient conditions for asserting that an evaluative predicate holds of a subject. But in the Homeric poems, that a man has behaved in certain ways is sufficient to entitle him to be called □γαθ□ς. Now, assertions as to how a man has behaved are certainly in the ordinary sense factual; and the Homeric use of □γαθ□ς is certainly in the ordinary sense evaluative. The alleged logical gulf between fact and appraisal is not so much one that has been bridged in Homer. It has never been dug. Nor is it clear that there is any ground in which to dig.

Moreover, I fail to be □γαθ□ς if and only if I fail to bring off the requisite performances; and the function of expressions of praise and blame is to invoke and to justify the rewards of success and the penalties of failure. You cannot avoid blame and penalty by pointing out that you could not help doing what you did, that failure was unavoidable. You may, of course, certainly point this out; but if your performance failed to satisfy the appropriate criteria, then you simply cannot prevent the withdrawal of the ascription of kingliness, courage, and cleverness or cunning. And this is to say that Homeric moral predicates are not applied, as moral predicates have been applied in our society, only where the agent could have done other than he did. Excuses, praise, and blame must all play different parts. We cannot even inquire whether (in the Kantian sense) ought implies can for Homer, for in Homer we cannot find ought (in the Kantian sense). So Odysseus blames the suitors, when he returns to Ithaca, for having had a false belief: “Dogs, you did not think that I would return home from Troy; for you have consumed my possessions, lain with my maidservants by force, and wooed my wife while I was yet alive, fearing neither the gods who inhabit the broad heaven, nor yet that there would be any retaliation from men hereafter; but now the doom of death in upon you all.”⁴ The suitors are blamed precisely for having a false belief; but this is what in a modern sense we would feel we could not blame people for. For to believe is not to perform an avoidable action. And it is not that Homer thinks that beliefs are voluntary; he is engaged in an assessment to which what the agent could or could not have done otherwise is irrelevant.

It will be useful now to look at a cognate of □γαθ□ς in Homer, the noun □ρετ□, usually and perhaps misleadingly translated vir-tue. A man who performs his socially allotted function possesses □ρετ□. The □ρετ□ of one function or role is quite different from that of another. The □ρετ□ of a king lies in ability to command, of a warrior in courage, of a wife in fidelity, and so on. A man is □γαθ□ς if he has the □ρετ□ of his particular and specific function. And this brings out the divorce of □γαθ□ς in the Homeric poems from later uses of good (including later uses of □γαθ□ς). When Agamemnon intends to steal the slave girl Briseis from Achilles, Nestor says to him, “Do not, □γαθ□ς though you be, take the girl from him.”⁵ It is not that, being □γαθ□ς, Agamemnon can be expected not to take the girl, nor that he will cease to be □γαθ□ς if he does take her. He will be □γαθ□ς whether he takes her or not. The way in which “□γαθ□ς” is tied so completely to fulfillment of function is also brought out in its links with other concepts. Shame, α□δ□ς, is what is felt by a man who fails to perform his allotted role. To feel shame is simply to be aware that you have entitled people to accuse you of having fallen short of that which the socially established description both you and others had applied to yourself had led them to expect. It is to be aware that one is liable to reproach.

This whole family of concepts, then, presupposes a certain sort of social order, characterized by a recognized hierarchy of functions. It is noteworthy that the value predicates can only be applied to those men who fall under the descriptions which taken together constitute the social vocabulary of the system. Those who fall outside the system fall outside the moral order. And this is indeed the fate of slaves; the slave becomes a chattel, a thing, rather than a person. It would miss the point to comment upon this that the Homeric poems are not a historically accurate picture of early Greek society or that no society as rigorously functional in fact existed. What we get in Homer is rather an idealization of one form of social life; we are presented with a social order and its concepts in a fairly pure form, rather than in the kind of admixture of several forms which a total society often presents. But for our conceptual purposes this is none the worse. For we have other literary documents in which we can see how the breakdown of a social hierarchy and of a system of recognized functions deprives the traditional moral terms and concepts of their social anchorage. In the body of poems which pass under the name of Theognis of Megara,⁶ and which were written in post-Homeric and preclassical Greece, we find startling changes in the uses of □γαθος and □ρετ□. They can no longer be defined in terms of the fulfillment in a recognized way of a recognized function; for there is no longer a single and unified society in which evaluation can depend on established criteria of this kind. Words like □γαθ□ς and κακ□ς (bad) become sometimes merely neutrally descriptive of social position. Or they may acquire an even more radical extension of meaning. Both processes are seen at once in a passage which runs: “Many κακοι are rich and many □γαθο□ are poor, but we will not take the wealth in exchange for our □ρετ□ for the one remains with a man always, but possessions pass from one man to another.” Here □γαθ□ς and κακ□ς seem to mean nobleborn and baseborn or some such equivalents. They have lost their old meaning and been transformed into one of the key identifying descriptions under which those to whom the terms applied in their old sense now fall. But they are no longer evaluative in the same way. Whereas in Homer one would have said of a ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of 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
• Notes
• Index