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Outlines of the history of ethics for English readers
Outlines of the history of ethics for English readers Author:Henry Sidgwick Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III.—Modern, Chiefly English, Ethics The concluding chapter is principally occupied with the process of English ethical thought from Hobbes to J. S. i. Hobbes... more » Mill: but, to explain Hobbism, it seemed desirable to begin 4? and by describing the previous view of Natural Law from which Hobbism is formed by antithesis, and which had been taken as the basis of International Law in the epoch-making work of Grotius, some fifteen years before Hobbes's view took written shape. For the century and a half that intervenes between Hobbes and Bentham the development of English ethics proceeds without receiving any material influence from foreign sources. This process may be conveniently divided into parts, as follows; but the reader must observe that the divisions cannot altogether be treated as chronologically successive. In the first period, the aspect of Hobbism which 2. Inde- orthodox moralists oppose is the dependence of social oraiit' morality on the establishment of political order. Overlook- Rational ing minor differences, we may distinguish broadly two lines fj of opposition: (i) that of the Cambridge moralists and I7")- Clarke, which laid stress on the self-evidence of moral principles viewed abstractly, and their intrinsic cogency for rational wills as such, apart from any consideration of them as laws laid down for men by an omnipotent ruler; (2) that of Cumberland and Locke, which treats morality as a code of Divine Legislation to be ascertained by considering the relations of human beings as designed and created by God. The former line I may call that of the Earlier Rational In- tuitionists, to distinguish it from the somewhat similar line of thought introduced in the next century by Price and Reid ; while the Jural moralists, Cumberland and Locke, are perhaps most instru...« less