Moral-Philosophy

For decades, philosophy textbooks treated Simone de Beauvoir as an appendix to Jean-Paul Sartre — the gifted companion who applied to the “woman question” ideas that were supposedly not her own. That reading is as tenacious as it is mistaken. Beauvoir was an original philosopher whose contributions to existentialist ethics and to the theory of oppression anticipate, on decisive points, formulations later credited to Sartre. And it was she, not he, who produced the work that would give twentieth-century feminism its philosophical foundation. To read Beauvoir as a thinker in her own right is not a gesture of historiographical courtesy: it is a demand of rigor. ...

Adam Smith Scottish moral philosopher and economist, considered the father of modern political economy. A central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment and close friend of Hume. His work combines sentiment-based ethics with market theory. Key Concepts Invisible hand: individuals’ self-interest, channeled through the market, generates collective benefit without central planning — a metaphor for the spontaneous order of the price system Division of labor: specialization of tasks multiplies productivity; the classic example of the pin factory Labor theory of value: the value of commodities ultimately derives from the labor embodied in their production Moral sympathy: the foundation of ethics — the capacity to put oneself in another’s position and evaluate actions from the perspective of an “impartial spectator” Impartial spectator: an imaginary figure representing balanced moral judgment, detached from self-interest Critique of mercantilism: a nation’s wealth is not the accumulation of precious metals, but its productive capacity and free exchange Free market and laissez-faire: defense of competition and criticism of monopolies, corporate privileges, and arbitrary state interventions Influenced by Hume — moral sentimentalism and skepticism about state intervention Francis Hutcheson — ethics of moral sense (his professor at Glasgow) Locke and Montesquieu — liberal political theories Mandeville — paradox of private vices / public benefits Influenced Ricardo and Mill — classical economics Marx — inherited (and critiqued) the labor theory of value Bentham — utilitarianism and calculation of collective well-being Modern economic liberalism and neoliberalism (Hayek, Friedman) Works The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759); The Wealth of Nations (1776). ...

Alasdair MacIntyre Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025) was a Scottish-American moral philosopher, the author of one of the most influential works of twentieth-century moral philosophy, After Virtue (1981). His intellectual career was marked by a long pilgrimage: he set out from Marxism in his youth, passed through several positions, and ultimately converted to Catholicism and to Aristotelian Thomism in his maturity. He died in May 2025. MacIntyre diagnosed modern moral language as being in a state of grave disorder — composed of decontextualised fragments of traditions that have been lost — and argued that the “Enlightenment project” of providing an autonomous rational justification for morality had failed, clearing the way for emotivism. His proposal was the recovery of a virtue ethics of Aristotelian-Thomist roots, anchored in communal life and in traditions of enquiry. ...

Bernard Williams Bernard Williams was one of the most important British moral philosophers of the twentieth century and one of the most penetrating critics of the ambition to ground ethics in a single, impersonal theoretical system. He taught at Cambridge, Berkeley, and Oxford. Against both utilitarianism and Kantianism, Williams insisted on the irreducible complexity of moral life, on the importance of the first-person perspective, of personal commitments and emotions, and on the inability of grand theories to capture everything that matters ethically. His writing combines classical learning, psychological sensitivity, and an elegant distrust of philosophical oversimplification. ...