Ethics

G.E. Moore British philosopher, co-founder — alongside Russell and Frege — of analytic philosophy. His critique of British idealism and his work in ethics decisively influenced the entire analytic tradition of the 20th century. Key Concepts Naturalistic fallacy: the error of defining the good in terms of natural properties (pleasure, evolution, desire). The good is simple, indefinable, and non-natural — it cannot be reduced to any empirical property. A central critique of utilitarianism and ethical naturalism Open question argument: for any natural property X, it always makes sense to ask “Is X good?” — if the good were identical to X, the question would be absurd. This proves that good ≠ X Moral intuitionism: fundamental moral values are known by direct intuition, not by inference or definition. Ethics is an autonomous science, not reducible to natural sciences Common sense realism: against the idealism of Berkeley and Hegel — the external world exists independently of the mind. Defense of common sense realism as the philosophical starting point Proof of the external world: “here is a hand, here is another” — he argues that we can prove the existence of the external world with more certainty than any abstract philosophical premise that denies it Conceptual analysis: the central task of philosophy is analysis — decomposing complex concepts into their simpler, more precise components; the program that defines analytic philosophy Intrinsic goods: certain states are good in themselves (friendship, beauty, knowledge) — independently of any consequence. A critique of hedonistic utilitarianism Influenced by Kant — deontological ethics and moral autonomy Russell — analytic program (mutual influence) Sidgwick — British moral intuitionism Influenced Russell and Wittgenstein — analytic philosophy Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, Keynes) — ethics and aesthetics Contemporary metaethics (intuitionism, moral realism) Karl Popper — theory of knowledge Works Principia Ethica (1903); Ethics (1912); Philosophical Studies (1922); Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953). ...

Harry Frankfurt Harry Gordon Frankfurt (29 May 1929, Langhorne, Pennsylvania — 16 July 2023, Santa Monica, California) was an American philosopher, professor emeritus at Princeton University, one of the most influential figures in the philosophy of action and of free will in the twentieth century. He began as a scholar of Descartes (Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen, 1970) and went on to build a concise, incisive body of work on the will, the person, and love — plus a short essay that would belatedly make him a bestselling author. ...

Immanuel Kant Born in Königsberg, in East Prussia, in 1724, and never having strayed from his native city, Immanuel Kant led the methodical life of a university professor — so regular, tradition holds, that his neighbors set their clocks by his daily walk. It was, in his own words, the reading of Hume that “awakened him from his dogmatic slumber” and led him into a long decade of silence, at the end of which, already 57 years old, he published the monumental Critique of Pure Reason (1781). His work both closes and refounds Modernity, mediating the dispute between the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. ...

Jeremy Bentham Founder of Utilitarianism. English jurist and philosopher; radical social reformer. His skeleton (Auto-Icon) is displayed at University College London, in accordance with his will. Trained for the bar, Bentham soon abandoned the practice of law to devote himself to its critique. His first target was the English common law and, in particular, William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which he accused of cloaking privilege and arbitrariness in solemn language. Against that tradition Bentham proposed a single, clear, measurable standard for evaluating laws and institutions: the principle of utility, according to which the worth of any action, law, or policy is measured by the amount of happiness — understood as pleasure and the absence of pain — that it produces for those affected. Morals and legislation would thus cease to rest on tradition, intuition, or supposed natural rights (which he dismissed as “nonsense upon stilts”) and become the object of a rational, secular calculation grounded in the empirical observation of human motives. ...

John Stuart Mill Born in London in 1806, John Stuart Mill was subjected by his father, James Mill, to an extraordinarily precocious and rigorous education — designed by Bentham’s circle to form a utilitarian thinker: he learned Greek at the age of three and devoured the classics and economics in childhood. At twenty he suffered a profound existential crisis, from which he recovered partly through Romantic poetry — an experience that led him to correct the arid utilitarianism in which he had been raised. He was also an economist, a Member of Parliament, and the intellectual companion of Harriet Taylor. He became the most influential liberal of the nineteenth century. ...

Joshua Greene Joshua Greene (b. 1974) is a professor of psychology and director of the Moral Cognition Laboratory at Harvard University. His work stands at the intersection of moral philosophy, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, and it represents one of the most prominent efforts in the empirical turn within contemporary ethics. Greene does not merely describe how people reason about moral questions; he uses that data to defend an explicit normative claim — that utilitarianism, or more precisely what he calls “deep pragmatic utilitarianism,” is the most defensible theory for adjudicating conflicts among groups with incompatible value systems. ...

Judith Jarvis Thomson Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929–2020) was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and one of the most rigorous voices in American analytic ethics during the second half of the twentieth century. Her work is distinguished by its meticulous analysis of concrete cases and its systematic use of thought experiments as testing devices for general moral principles. Educated at Columbia University and at Cambridge (UK), she devoted decades to the examination of rights, moral permissibility, causation, and responsibility — with particular attention to situations in which strong intuitions collide with otherwise coherent normative theories. ...

Kwame Anthony Appiah Kwame Anthony Appiah was born on 8 May 1954 in London, to a Ghanaian father (Joe Appiah, lawyer and politician) and a British mother (Peggy Cripps). He grew up in Kumasi, Ghana, and studied philosophy at Cambridge (BA and PhD). He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton; he is currently professor at New York University. Appiah is one of the most versatile and influential philosophers in the contemporary anglophone world, with contributions to ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, racial theory, and political philosophy. He is one of the thinkers who has most systematically challenged the presuppositions of “racialism” — the belief that human races exist as biological entities endowed with moral and intellectual essences. ...

Marcus Aurelius Marcus Aurelius Antoninus ruled Rome from 161 to 180 CE and is remembered as the last of the “Five Good Emperors” and as the most celebrated example of the ancient ideal of the philosopher-king. Adopted into the line of succession by Antoninus Pius, he received a careful education and turned early to Stoicism, above all through reading Epictetus, to whom he had been introduced by his teacher Junius Rusticus. His reign, far from peaceful, was beset by wars on the Danube frontier, by revolts, and by the devastating Antonine Plague — circumstances in which his philosophy proved less a doctrine than a discipline of inner survival. ...

Mencio Note on sources: The dates of Mencius (孟子 Mèngzǐ, “Master Meng”; personal name Kē 軻) are conventional estimates — c. 372–289 BCE — based on traditional historical chronologies. The text Mèngzǐ (孟子), compiled in 7 books (piān), is considered more unified than Confucius’s Analects, although it also involved contributions from disciples in its final redaction. Mencius is honored in the Confucian tradition as the “Second Sage” (Yàshèng 亞聖), immediately below Confucius. ...

Philippa Foot Philippa Foot (1920–2010) was one of the most influential British moral philosophers of the twentieth century and a central figure in the revival of virtue ethics. Educated and long based at Oxford, she also taught for extended periods in the United States. Her intellectual career amounts to a sustained challenge to the non-cognitivism and emotivism that dominated post-war Anglophone metaethics: against the thesis of a radical separation between fact and value, Foot sought to show that moral judgements have cognitive content and are rooted in facts about human life. Her work culminates in the neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism of Natural Goodness (2001). She was also a figure of civic conscience: she was among the founders of Oxfam, the organisation devoted to fighting hunger and poverty. ...

Robert Nozick Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher and professor at Harvard, whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) became the most systematic and rigorous libertarian response to John Rawls’s theory of justice, reorienting anglophone political-philosophical debate for decades. Beyond political philosophy, he made original contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Key Concepts Rights as Side Constraints (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974): Nozick holds that individual rights are side constraints on action — not factors to be maximised within a calculation, but limits that cannot be violated even when violation would produce better outcomes for the greatest number. Individual dignity prohibits using persons as mere means to others’ ends. ...

Seneca Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in Corduba, in Hispania, around 4 BCE, the son of Seneca the Elder, a renowned teacher of rhetoric. He was the most influential — and also the most controversial — of the Roman Stoics: a wealthy and powerful senator, he endured exile in Corsica under the emperor Claudius and, on his return to Rome, became tutor and later advisor to the young Nero, whom he sought to restrain in the early years of his reign. Accused of taking part in the Pisonian conspiracy, he was forced by Nero to take his own life in 65 CE — a death that, according to Tacitus’s account, he faced with the serenity his philosophy preached. ...

Simone de Beauvoir French philosopher; intellectual companion of Sartre. Founder of existentialist feminism. The Second Sex is one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Born in Paris in 1908, Beauvoir studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and passed the agrégation examination in 1929, becoming one of the first women in France to earn that distinction. A central figure in the post-war Parisian existentialist circle, she co-founded the journal Les Temps Modernes and engaged actively in the major political and moral debates of her time, from anticolonialism to critiques of Stalinism. Her core philosophical project was to apply existentialist categories — facticity, situation, project — to the concrete condition of women, demonstrating that female oppression is not rooted in nature but in historical and social structures that can, and must, be transformed. ...

Socrates Socrates is the pivot of Greek philosophy: his figure divides the tradition between the pre-Socratics, concerned with the investigation of nature (physis), and the Socratics, who shifted the focus to the human being, the soul, and ethics. An Athenian of the fifth century B.C., son of the sculptor Sophroniscus and the midwife Phaenarete, he lived through the Peloponnesian War — serving as a hoplite at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis — and turned the streets and gymnasia of Athens into the setting for an entirely oral philosophy. He left no writings: everything we know comes from others, above all the dialogues of Plato and the writings of Xenophon, alongside the comic caricature of Aristophanes (The Clouds). The difficulty of separating the historical Socrates from the literary character is what scholars call the “Socratic problem.” ...

Thomas Aquinas Born around 1225 in Roccasecca, near Aquino, in southern Italy, Thomas belonged to the high nobility, which firmly opposed his entry into the mendicant order of the Dominicans — even confining him for about a year. He studied under Albert the Great in Paris and Cologne and became a master of theology at the University of Paris. Despite the nickname “the dumb ox,” he proved to be the greatest genius of Scholasticism. After an intense experience in 1273, he ceased writing, saying that all he had produced seemed to him like “straw”; he died the following year, on his way to the Council of Lyon. Canonized in 1323, he is “the Angelic Doctor,” and Thomism remains the official reference of Catholic philosophy. ...

Thomas Nagel Thomas Nagel is one of the most respected contemporary philosophers working in philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Born in 1937, he is a professor at New York University (NYU). His work returns obstinately to a single theme: the difficulty of reconciling the inner, subjective perspective of each conscious being with the external, impersonal, objective perspective that science and reason strive for. Known for his lucid prose and the intellectual honesty with which he exposes the limits of his own solutions, Nagel resists both easy reductions and mysticism, holding that certain philosophical problems are genuine and should not be dissolved prematurely. ...

Wang Yangming Wang Yangming (王陽明 Wáng Yángmíng, 1472–1529; courtesy name Bó’ān, personal name Shǒurén 守仁) is the most influential Neo-Confucian thinker of the Ming dynasty and the founder of the so-called “school of mind” (xīnxué 心學). Besides being a philosopher, he was a senior state official and a successful military commander, and his doctrine arose in dialogue with that practical experience. His thought constitutes the chief alternative to the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy of Zhu Xi, the “school of principle” (lǐxué 理學), which dominated the imperial examination system. ...

Xunzi Xunzi (荀子 Xún Zǐ, “Master Xun”; personal name Kuàng 況), who lived around c. 310–c. 235 BCE, is, alongside Confucius and Mencius, one of the three great thinkers of classical Confucianism. He was active during the Warring States period and was a figure of prestige at the Jixia Academy in the state of Qi. His philosophy stands out for its argumentative rigour and its naturalism: whereas other Confucians grounded morality in a morally engaged celestial order, Xunzi grounds it in human culture, ritual, and deliberate education. ...

Zeno of Citium Founder of Stoicism. He taught at the Stoa Poikilê (Painted Porch) in Athens — hence the name of the school. After hearing the story of Socrates through the cynicism of Crates, he abandoned commerce to dedicate himself to philosophy. He taught that virtue is the only real good; everything else (wealth, health, fame) is indifferent (adiaphora). The universe is permeated by the divine Logos (rational fire) and each event occurs by rational necessity. ...