The development of modern science from the sixteenth century onward altered the European culture that was its home, and the philosophies that arose from the effort to comprehend and to aid or halt the growth of scientific understanding have occupied a central place in our thinking and teaching ever since. A second change in European culture during this period, no less momentous, was equally intertwined with philosophy. The view people had of themselves as moral agents changed, and with it their view of their responsibilities and their possibilities. The philosophy involved in this change, resisting it or helping create and understand it, was moral philosophy. Its history has not been as carefully studied and as regularly taught as has the history of epistemology and metaphysics. Yet the problems that engaged moral philosophers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have their own distinctive motivations and are at least as significant as those of epistemology and metaphysics. It is not necessary that our work on the history of modern philosophy be mainly concentrated – as it conventionally has been – on the latter issues. The history of ethics is an equally significant field of study.

Aims of the Anthology

The readings gathered in this anthology were chosen to show what the issues regarding morality were and how philosophical thought about them developed during this period. I have, of course, included the well-known philosophers to whose work we commonly trace the origins of our current problems and options in philosophical ethics: Hobbes, Butler, Hume, Bentham, Kant. I have set their writings amid selections from some of the now lesser-known writers who were their predecessors and contemporaries.