As in the first volume, my attention here will be devoted mainly, though hardly entirely, to ethical philosophers’ attempts to come to grips with deontic morality understood in the terms of Anscombe’s critique. Sometimes, these will be defenses and theoretical accounts, as with, for example, the nineteenth-century utilitarians – whether empiricist, like Bentham and Mill, or “philosophical intuitionist,” like Henry Sidgwick – or the moral theories of British idealists like T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley. But unlike mainstream seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy – for instance, the modern natural lawyers, Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, and Cumberland, the British rationalists, and Kant – the ethical philosophy of the nineteenth century is more often concerned to criticize deontic morality or to put it in its place. Examples here are Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and, of course, Nietzsche.

Bentham gave utilitarianism its name and put it on the map, both as a philosophical theory and as a reforming social and political doctrine. In all of his philosophizing, Bentham was most fundamentally concerned with its relevance for law and, ultimately, for a distinctive kind of legal, social, and political reform. Bentham was unalterably opposed to legal and political doctrines whose only grounding was in tradition and any common sense tradition informs. This extended also to his views about morality. His defense of the principle of is not grounded, as Sidgwick will argue any moral principle must be, in intuition. But neither does Bentham ground his utilitarianism in an empiricist-naturalist metaethics, as do Cumberland and Mill, though his metaphysics certainly has that character. Bentham holds that the ultimate grounding of utilitarianism must be political. According to Bentham, the utility principle is the only one that can play the role that a moral principle must be able to play in informed noncoercive public debate. In this way, Bentham anticipates Rawls’s “political liberalism.” This chapter argues that Bentham could accept Rawls’s an emended version of Rawls’s slogan: “the principle of utility: political, not metaphysical.”

What Fichte found most inspiring in Kant’s critical philosophy was its Copernican focus on the transcendental conditions of conscious thought, its doctrine of the autonomy of reason, and, most especially, its fundamental commitment to freedom of the will. Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies of right are especially close in form and content. Both works treat the philosophy of right as a separate subject that is independent of ethical philosophy, and both ground their theories in a fundamental right of freedom from interference. We see, right at the outset, the importance of freedom in modern moral philosophy in Anscombe’s sense. We begin, however, with Fichte’s ethics. Fichte’s ethics of autonomy or, as he usually prefers to say, “self-sufficiency” or “independence,” departs from Kant’s in several important ways. The most important structurally is that whereas autonomy is at the heart of grounding what Kant takes to be the fundamentally formal character of the moral law. Fichte holds, against “all of the authors who have treated ethics merely formally,” that self-sufficiency or independence is a “material” kind of freedom. Fichte’s ethics sets autonomous self-determination as a fundamental moral end, and is ultimately consequentialist.

The forms that utilitarianism took before Sidgwick were almost invariably empiricist and naturalist. To such positions, Sidgwick poses a challenge similar to, but ultimately deeper than, Moore’s more famous charge that such positions inevitably commit a “naturalistic fallacy.” In Sidgwick’s version, empiricist-naturalist theories that attempt to understand ethical concepts and properties in empirical-natural terms all fail to account for their normativity. That can be done, Sidgwick argues, only by recognizing that all ethical judgments contain “the fundamental notion represented by the word ‘ought.’” Sidgwick holds, against Mill and his empiricist predecessors like Hutcheson, that the method of ethics must be “intuitive” rather than “inductive,” in Mill’s terms. Sidgwick’s intuitionism is not, however, the sort that Mill most ardently opposes; it is a “philosophical intuitionism,” by contrast with the complacent commonsense intuitions that Mill seeks to reform with his inductive utilitarianism. This is where Sidgwick’s “dualism of practical reason” comes in. Sidgwick holds that there are two potentially conflicting ultimate rational intuitions: (a) the “axiom of Prudence,” which counsels agents to pursue their own greatest good and (b) the “axiom of Rational Benevolence.” And both of these are hedonistic, yielding rational egoistic hedonism and hedonistic utilitarianism, respectively.

Unlike the utilitarians, the British Idealists – T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley – were steeped in ancient Greek philosophy and post-Kantian German idealism. Both thinkers had a eudaimonist outlook along with a profound interest in Hegel and Fichte, which had been mostly missing from anglophone philosophy. During his lifetime, Green was known more for his political ideas and activity than for his moral philosophy, which was published only posthumously. Green’s moral and political philosophy hang together, however. The justification for political order, and indeed, for any claim of right, Green thinks, is its role in enabling citizens to realize themselves in ethical action through active membership in a community with a common good. Green was a perfectionist eudaimonist, like Aristotle, but he was also a modern who, like Kant and Hegel, advanced an ethics of freedom. For Green, the self-realization that is our final end actualizes a positive form of freedom. For the most part, Bradley’s philosophical fame was due to his metaphysical and logical works, most especially, his Principles of Logic and Appearance and Reality. His Ethical Studies is an important work, however, which contains trenchant criticisms of Mill’s Utilitarianism along with a sketch of Bradley’s own idealist ethics.

A number of philosophical themes run throughout Marx’s corpus. Foremost is his focus on free social and political relations – on emancipated people governing themselves together rather than being mastered by others. There is no doubt, however, that Marx was a sharp critic of law, justice, and right (Recht) – which Kant had argued can only be realized in a state – and that Marx’s communist social ideal is nonjuridical. A second theme is that although Marx rejects the modern deontic conception of morality, he is very much aware that his own ideal of freedom is a modern conception, which is based, like modern morality, in a view of the unique value of human persons – the “self-worth of men” as “free.” A third is Marx’s communitarian emphasis on “a community of people [organized] for their highest ends”: a “democratic” society of free people, whether organized as a state or not. It is important that Marx does not ground his democratic conception as orthodox liberal moderns do in a deontic conception of fundamental equal human authority. Ultimately, Marx’s ideas must be understood as a liberal egalitarianism of the good rather than of the right.

The other philosopher writing in Kant’s wake who figures prominently in the origins of “continental” philosophy is Hegel. Although many of the seeds of Hegel’s thought were planted by Fichte, Hegel’s works ultimately had far greater direct impact. Hegel was not, however, an ethical or moral philosopher like Fichte. T. H. Irwin plausibly claims, indeed, that Hegel actually denies that moral philosophy is “a distinct discipline.” But Hegel had a massive influence on the history of ethics even so, including on “modern moral philosophy.” Partly this was as a critic, not just of moral philosophy, but also of the modern conception of morality itself. Hegel argues that what he and other moderns call “morality” (Moralität) is a formal abstraction that is incapable of “truth” or “reality.” Moral philosophers who focus on oughts and obligation mistake, in his view, an abstract moment of practical thought for something realizable; they fasten on a desiccated abstraction rather than the “living good” that is embodied in actual modern (liberal) customs and institutions, what Hegel calls “ethical life.” Hegel’s critique of morality begins a tradition that runs through Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and through Anscombe and Bernard Williams in the twentieth.

Although Mill learned Bentham’s utilitarianism literally at his father James Mill’s knee, Mill’s own version of utilitarianism departed from Bentham’s at key points. When Mill tried to live Bentham’s utilitarian doctrine as a youth, he was sent into a deep depression from which he was saved by reading the Romantic poetry and a romantic relationship with Harriet Taylor. This led him to reject Bentham’s “quantitative hedonism” in favor of a “qualitative hedonism” that emphasized intrinsic differences between different kinds of pleasures and held that some pleasures are “higher,” and therefore more valuable, than others. Here Mill’s view recalls Aristotle’s that pleasures resulting from exercising higher, distinctively human faculties and sensibilities are intrinsically better. Unlike Aristotle, however, Mill persisted in holding that his view is a version of hedonism, defended on nonteleological, empirical naturalist grounds. A second important departure from Bentham, was Mill’s holding that the deontic ideas of moral right and wrong are conceptually connected to accountability. This made him a “modern moral philosopher” by Anscombe’s definition and led him to defend, on these grounds, a utilitarian theory of rights and justice as well as a version of utilitarianism that was more like rule utilitarianism than act utilitarianism.

When Nietzsche disparaged the “English utilitarians” in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, he was referring to followers of Jeremy Bentham, most prominently to John Stuart Mill, whose Utilitarianism was published in 1861 and 1863. Mill took the term “utilitarianism” from Bentham. There was, however, a lot of utilitarian theorizing before Bentham, much of it quite sophisticated. That is the subject of the present chapter. The leading figures with whom we are concerned are Richard Cumberland, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, George Berkeley, John Gay, and William Paley. Hutcheson and Hume are especially important figures, although both are known as virtue theorists. Hutcheson was the first to formulate the “greatest happiness principle” in English, and Bentham wrote that he read the proto-utilitarian passages in Hume’s Treatise, he felt as if the “scales had fallen from his eyes.” Another important influence on Bentham was Paley. The inspiration for Mill’s utilitarianism in his turn, however, was decidedly Bentham. This chapter surveys the roots of nineteenth-century utilitarianism in the natural law theory of Cumberland, the theological voluntarism of Berkeley, and the virtue theories of Hutcheson and Hume. Hutcheson put forward a sophisticated utilitarian theory of rights, and Berkeley, a version of rule utilitarianism.

Nietzsche’s famous critique of morality is that it is a mere ideology that is rooted in unconscious psychological mechanisms of “ressentiment.” Those mechanisms lead a “priestly caste” and their “herd” of followers to fashion new ethical concepts – those of deontic morality – that project repressed anger and hatred rather than responding to anything true or really valuable. In these respects, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard seem light years apart. However, there are also significant affinities between these two otherwise opposed philosophers. One concerns the role of faith. Although Nietzsche is no friend of religious faith, he emphasizes that the “free spirit” of his favored “overmen” involves faith, but of a different kind. A second point of agreement between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard concerns the signal importance of the particular individual and the claim that authentic individuality can only be achieved outside and beyond morality. For Nietzsche, the “free spirit” of a “new philosophy” is only possible once the sociocultural consequences of deontic morality have been fully worked through in a way that enables individuals to become their own “sovereigns” and take responsibility for their own lives without the crutch of morality. Only then can there be “autonomous, supra-ethical individual[s].”