Ever since Selby-Bigge published his anthology almost a century ago, the term British moralists has come to refer to moral philosophers writing in Britain from roughly the time of Hobbes in the middle of the seventeenth century through that of Bentham at the end of the eighteenth. This was a time of extraordinary ferment and creativity throughout Europe, no less in philosophy than in other areas. We call the period “early modern” to mark it as a point of departure, as one that broke in significant ways with forms of thought and organization of earlier periods and to which we can trace many of the terms in which we still encounter issues of intellectual, moral, and political life. No doubt all epochal categories are crude and distorting. Still, it seems undeniable that what we now think of as science, for example, is much more like what Boyle and Newton were engaged in than anything in the ancient world or in what came in between. Similarly, thanks to fundamental changes in political organization and thought just before and during this period, we are far likelier to find problems of political life posed in terms that are recognizably ours in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau than in Renaissance, medieval, or ancient texts, continuing interest in Aristotle notwithstanding.

The same is true, in large measure, in ethics, especially in moral philosophy. Questions about how to live a human life or about what does or should matter to us are, naturally, nearly as old as philosophy itself.