In “Modern Moral Philosophy” Anscombe famously argues against the main thrust of European ethical philosophy since the mid-seventeenth century. Her main complaint is that the conceptual structure of modern moral philosophy – focusing on obligation, duty, right, and wrong, rather than the classical Greek focus of virtue and the good life – cannot be sustained without divine legislation, which many moderns have tried to avoid. Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant will carefully analyze both canonical and lesser known texts to demonstrate that philosophers of the period have resources to answer Anscombe’s Challenge. Many of the philosophers studied were central in this: early modern natural lawyers Grotius, Pufendorf, and Hobbes; critics of natural law, like Leibniz and Shaftesbury; moral sentimentalists Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith; rationalists like Clarke, Price, and Reid; and, of course, Kant. One of the most interesting sources of response is a connection many philosophers made between morality and accountability and insights they had about the psychological prerequisites and presuppositions of accountability.

In this chapter, it is argued that reasons stemming from different sources of normativity can be compared and balanced against each other, and that sometimes the all-things-considered verdict about such cases should be a gradualist one. The term extramural gradualism refers to this type of gradualist all-things-considered verdict. Acts that are somewhat normatively right in this extramural sense need not be somewhat morally right. An act can be somewhat right in the extramural sense even if it is morally right simpliciter. It is the conflict between different sources of normativity that triggers a gradualist extramural verdict, not the gradualist properties of the verdict it is based on. However, acts that are somewhat normatively right in the extramural sense may of course be somewhat morally right, or somewhat right with respect to self-interest. It is logically possible to be a gradualist about extramural verdicts but not about other types of verdicts, but considerations that support extramural gradualism also tend to support gradualism about the moral concepts RIGHT and WRONG.

This chapter develops a selective genealogy of the concept of publicity as it appears throughout the history of political thought, beginning with Plato and ending with Henry Sidgwick. Beyond its intrinsic interest, there is instrumental value to tracing a genealogy of publicity. Two benefits stand out in particular. First, by looking to what the giants of the past had to say about transparency in government, we find a greater diversity of positions than we currently see. Some flatly reject openness in government, embracing opacity in its place. And second, looking to the past shows how the concept of publicity can take on many different forms. Sometimes it refers to being offered justifications for the laws one lives under, sometimes it means that persons must have access to the philosophical theories inspiring the political systems they inhabit, sometimes it is used as a kind of test to probe the morality of public policies, sometimes it means that persons should be able to carefully monitor what public officials are up to, and so on.

John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick grappled with the perspectival problem arising from Bentham’s full rejection of the theological justification for the legislative point of view. Mill’s intriguing suggestion that “wrong” refers to that which should be punished by law, public opinion, or private conscience combined with his assumption that all three are open to revision on utilitarian principles leads to the interesting conclusion that our moral statements about right and wrong are tacit legislative proposals. When deciding whether to voice our moral opinions we must think like legislators enacting a rule. This was in tension with the idea that our public expressions of moral judgment should be spontaneous reactions to the poor choices of others. Sidgwick grasped the implications of this issue more clearly and more self-consciously than did Mill, since it meant that there was a potentially deep disjunction between what is right according to utilitarianism and what utilitarianism tells us to publicly state as right. Sidgwick’s defense of an esoteric morality is the final outcome of the attempt to secularize morality as legislation.

Chapter 3 further establishes the significance of Aristotelian virtue theory within the landscape of British moral philosophy, where it has been almost entirely neglected. It begins with the 1874 publication of Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics, which was a significant literary event because it identified virtue ethics with “aesthetic” modes of reasoning. An Aristotelian conception of stylistic character subsequently flourished in the philosophical writings of J.S. Mill, John Grote, T.H. Green, and Bernard Bosanquet, all of whom rejected the dissociation of ethics from aesthetics and imagined character as an aesthetic realization of the self. In this way, philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition provided an ethical justification for aesthetic autonomy and the character-based formalism of Victorian stylistic criticism.