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 and Self-love” (1998 [1886]: 198). Modern moral philosophy is obsessed with the apparent conflict of morality and self-interest.
The last thirty years have seen a flourishing of work on this historical rift, tracing its origins and significance through close, enriching attention to a wider canon of moral philosophers: not just Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, but Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Richard Cumberland, Ralph Cudworth, Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, John Balguy, Samuel Clarke, Richard Price, and Thomas Reid, not to mention Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. A landmark here is Jerry Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy (1998), which focused on the “Grotian problematic”: how to justify morality and the social order without appeal to an outmoded teleological naturalism that ensures the harmony of our real interests.
Like any orthodoxy, the doctrine of the rift has its dissenters. The most ambitious is Terence Irwin, whose monumental history The Development of Ethics (2007: 4) argues for continuity between modern moral philosophy and Aristotelian naturalism, understood as “an account of the human good as happiness (eudaimonia), consisting in the fulfillment of human nature, expressed in the various human virtues.” Aquinas is the hero, locating obligation, conscience, and moral law in an Aristotelian framework. But Irwin finds Aristotelian naturalism at work in later figures from Grotius to Joseph Butler.
Enter Stephen Darwall, who has been thinking about these issues for more than thirty years and writing the present book, with interruptions, for more than twenty. Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant is both a wonderful introduction to the wider canon sketched above and an original, distinctive take on the rift between ancient and modern moral philosophy.
Darwall’s response to Irwin brings his principal thesis into view. Irwin hopes to reconcile ancient and modern moral philosophy by finding room in Aristotelian naturalism for virtues that concern one’s treatment of others; these virtues contribute to eudaimonia not because of their beneficial effects but as intrinsic constituents of the human good. Darwall objects that this does not do justice to the relational force of deontic morality: the idea of moral rights and the correlative notion of wronging another individual; the idea that obligation makes us accountable to one another. So long as the agent’s good is treated as the sole source of reasons, Darwall argues, we miss the modern conception of deontic reasons whose authority does not derive from how they benefit the agent but from other people. It’s this conception that Darwall finds in Grotius. He traces its vicissitudes through two centuries to Kant, who tries but fails to make good sense of it. For that, we need the second-person turn of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right.
Darwall has written a brilliant book. He has an artisan’s ability to discern the vital structure in a thinker’s work: What are the moving parts, the meaningful points of agreement and disagreement with others, the philosophical strengths and weaknesses? His interpretations are generally convincing, but there were two moments at which I paused. One was Darwall’s invocation of Anscombe, according to which she “concluded that there can be such a thing as morality only if it is legislated by God” (2). Anscombe’s view is more radical: that there is no such thing as morality, under any circumstance, because moral obligation is a pseudoconcept. God’s legislation can give us reasons, as it does for Aquinas, within the framework of Aristotelian naturalism. But, for Anscombe, such reasons are not distinctively moral. Moral obligation appears when we posit reasons that are just like God’s commands—except that they do not involve commands or the existence of God. Anscombe doubts that we can attach any sense to ideology that originates in this way.
The second point at which I paused was over Hume, whom Darwall reads—in accordance with long-standing but, I think, mistaken tradition—as holding that intentional actions are always caused by desires that are not caused by belief alone; as an “internalist” about moral judgments, on which they motivate in the same way as desires; as arguing on the basis of these premises for a sentimentalist precursor of noncognitivism about morality; and as making an epistemological case that reasoning cannot justify moral judgments, since it deals with only with relations of ideas and matters of fact. As recent interpreters have argued, Hume concedes that desire can be caused by belief alone (in the section of the Treatise titled “Of the Influence of Belief”); he downplays the motivational power of moral sentiments (as Darwall later acknowledges); he thus casts doubt on the premises of the “motivation argument” for noncognitivism; he is concerned primarily with the origin of moral concepts, not the justification of moral judgments; and he is in as good a position to make sense of moral beliefs as he is of beliefs about the colors of things.
Still, with both Anscombe and Hume, Darwall’s interpretation is sufficiently orthodox to orient readers in helpful ways. And elsewhere, his readings struck me as compelling and sometimes revelatory. For instance, Darwall cuts through intractable questions about Leviathan by treating Hobbes as a proto-expressivist not just about the good (in relation to desire) but about obligation (in relation to the moral emotions thematized by Grotius).
Turning to Butler, Darwall finds arguments for the authority of conscience over self-love that anticipate the two main rationales for contemporary “constitutivism” about practical reason. One is teleological: the function of conscience in agents like us is to govern, so agency goes best when conscience governs. The other is transcendental: it’s part of being the kind of agent we are that we treat conscience as authoritative; there’s no way to opt out. Darwall is more sympathetic to the second argument than the first. I lean the other way. It’s not clear how the transcendental argument could show that conscience is truly authoritative, as opposed to showing that we must believe it to be. And Darwall’s objection to the teleological argument, that it can’t establish the normativity of proper functioning or give us reason to function this way, is open to the reply that practical rationality just is the proper functioning of rational agency. Whether he is right or wrong about the merits of the arguments, however, Darwall makes a case for Butler’s pivotal importance in the history of moral philosophy.
Equally illuminating, for me, was Darwall’s treatment of the British rationalists, from Clarke to Price, in whom he finds related versions of a single central argument. Its Kantian premise is that moral obligations hold for all rational beings, not just ones like us, and since obligation implies accountability and thus the capacity to know and respond to obligation, moral knowledge and motivation cannot depend on anything specific to human nature. Hence the need to derive them from reason alone—another Kantian theme.
Kant himself comes in for instructive criticism in the course of a terrific introduction to his moral theory. The crux is that moral obligation, for Kant, is in a way epiphenomenal: it is the presentation of nondeontic practical reason to finite creatures like us. Perfectly rational beings would have no need for conscience or the burdens of duty. Despite himself, then, Kant is not truly modern, since the modern view is one in which there are fundamentally deontic reasons. According to Darwall, this makes trouble for his key arguments, which trade illicitly on ideas of accountability he cannot substantiate. This is what goes wrong in the derivation of the Formula of Universal Law: unless we bring in the idea of holding one another accountable, we can’t justify a form of universalization that rules out rational egoism. Something similar is true of Kant’s conception of autonomy and the fact of reason: what we need for the latter is a weight-bearing notion of accountability, which brings moral obligation into view, that Kant’s system does not provide. Nor does Darwall find modern morality in Kant’s Doctrine of Right, which discusses the permissible use of force or limitation of external freedom, since the use of force falls short of the authoritative giving of reasons: Fichte’s second-person perspective.
There is a huge amount to learn from reading Darwall’s book. But what should we make of its guiding thought, that the shift from ancient to modern means the end of Aristotelian naturalism and the recognition of deontic reasons that are independent of the human good? There are grounds for caution.
Darwall describes eudaimonism in ways that make it sound like rational egoism: “All normative reasons for action must derive from the agent’s own good or happiness (eudaimonia).... If Socrates cannot establish that it is intrinsically or extrinsically beneficial to the just person to be just, he will not have shown any reason for them to act justly” (5). This is potentially misleading. Rational egoists distinguish between putative moral and self-interested reasons, then deny the existence of the former. But, to paraphrase Anscombe, if someone is expounding Aristotle and talks about “rational self-interest,” his intellectual jaws should feel badly misaligned. Aristotle is innocent of the idea that reasons can be distinguished in this way, some being selfish, others not; and it is distorting to describe this fact by suggesting that he collapses all reasons into egoistic ones. (The distortion is encouraged by the translation of “eudaimonia” as happiness, when it is not a state of mind but the life that is most worth choosing.)
Even the idea that reasons “derive” from the agent’s good is a disputable imposition. That is one way to situate reasons in a eudaimonist framework. But it is equally consistent with Aristotelian naturalism to see them as facts that make an action, or a life, worth choosing, where these may well include relational, deontic reasons. A life could be choice-worthy in part because it involves doing right by others. We can thus deny that reasons are ever independent of the human good—since they determine that it is—without saying that the reason to do something is always, fundamentally, the fact that it’s good for you. There’s nothing to prevent an Aristotelian naturalist who takes this view from recognizing irreducibly relational, deontic reasons.
It may seem that, understood in this way, eudaimonism is trivial: the idea that we have reasons to live good lives places no constraint on what those reasons are. But the significance of eudaimonism lies in what it leaves out. For instance, eudaimonism gives no fundamental role in ethics to good states of affairs. More importantly, it draws no line between selfish and unselfish reasons, not because all reasons are self-interested but because the very concept of self-interest is one we can do without. We might say of “self-interest” what Anscombe said of “morality”: that no clear sense attaches to the word. This gives a different shape to the project of explaining relational, deontic reasons, since the project is no longer framed by anxiety about the existence of unselfish reasons, as such: this anxiety has no content. There is room for another grand narrative, alongside Darwall’s, on which the key historical shift was the invention of self-interest—or if “invention” connotes success, the confabulation of self-interest in modern moral philosophy.
