Ancient and Modern Ethics

Henry Sidgwick is in many regards the greatest moral philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century. But it was in a generally neglected chapter (I.9) of his masterpiece, The Methods of Ethics, that he made some of his most penetrating remarks about the foundations of ethics. The nature of moral value, he suggested, assumes two fundamentally different forms, depending on whether the notion of right or the notion of good is thought to be more basic. Furthermore, these two views of morality were in his eyes historically distinct: the priority of the good was central to Greek ethics, whereas modern ethics has embraced the priority of the right. Sidgwick's observations seem to me correct and important. In this chapter I will examine how these two views of morality differ and show why it is useful to explain the differences between ancient and modern ethics along these lines. But this discussion will also indicate how each of the two conceptions may prove unappealing to us in certain respects. In this light, we can better understand why our present moral thought seems so often disoriented, no longer fully at home in the leading currents of modern ethics, but also unable to return to the ancients. At the end, I will suggest a promising way to steer through these fundamental difficulties in the nature of morality. The exploration of this approach, however, will be the subject of the following chapter.