There is a rift between ancient and modern moral philosophy: between their conceptual worlds, presuppositions, and problems. So, at least, it has seemed to many. “If someone professes to be expounding Aristotle and talks in a modern fashion about ‘moral’ such-and-such,” Elizabeth Anscombe (1958: 2) memorably quipped, “he must be very imperceptive if he does not constantly feel like someone whose jaws have somehow got out of alignment: the teeth don’t come together in a proper bite.”
Anscombe argued that modern moral philosophy is misconceived. One of her targets was Henry Sidgwick, but on the issue of the rift, if not its valence, they basically agree: “In Greek moral philosophy generally,” Sidgwick wrote, “but one regulative and governing faculty is recognised under the name of Reason [whereas] in the modern ethical view, when it has worked itself clear, there are found to be two,—Universal Reason and Egoistic Reason, or Conscience...
