** Ships Passing in the Night **

Between the adherents of rival moralities, there exists no court of appeal.

If you want to learn about ethics, don’t start here. A Short History of Ethics is not a history in the sense that it tells the story about the interconnection of events in western civilization’s ethical timeline. Instead, it is a chronological critique of different ethical viewpoints, with a thesis that most ethical systems do not effectively interact.

MacIntyre competently frames the differences between Aristotle and Plato, I’m not sure if this was the only section I felt comfortable with because the writing was lucid or because I already read the source material. * Socrates: Virtue and knowledge are the same. No-one errs willingly that is if men do wrong it is an intellectual error not moral weakness that is the cause. And this, contrary to what Aristotle points out is opposite to what ordinary men take to be obvious experience. *

Christianity is mentioned almost in passing, and by the time we get to renaissance thinking, the author critiques of ethical positions seemingly out of the void. Other than Russel’s A History of Western Philosophy, this is my first exposure to many of these authors, and frankly I’d rather get a firm understanding of each philosopher’s position before embarking on criticism.

For Voltaire: * On moral questions in general, the enlightenment critique is that men behave irrationally, and the recipe for social improvement is that henceforward, men should behave rationally. […] It is with relief that one turns from this relief of mediocrity to the passion of Rousseau. *

For Kant: * The doctrine of a categorical imperative provides me with a doctrine for rejecting proposed maxims, it does not tell me whence I am to derive the maxims which first provide the need for a test, thus Kantian doctrine is parasitic on some already existing morality. *

On Modern Philosophy: * In our society, the acids of individualism have for four centuries eaten into our moral structures. *

Perhaps this strategy is a reasonable tack for a more advanced ethics reader, but for a novice reader like me, it does a disservice.

By the time we got to the chapter Kierkegaard to Nietzsche I was lost. In trying to prove different ethical frameworks mutually incomprehensible, he just painted some as incomprehensible to me.

** 71st book of 2022. **

Quotes I liked:

  • Those who wish to separate politics from morals, will never understand either. Rousseau *

  • Politics ought be adujusted not to human reasonsings, but to human nature, of which the human reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part. This is not just a doctrine about politics, but about the moral life in general. *