In the Introduction to the original printing of this anthology I said that a proper account of the readings it contains would require a substantial volume on the history of modern moral philosophy. My attempt to provide such an account is contained in The Invention of Autonomy, published about nine years after the anthology was finished. Not surprisingly, as I worked on the book I changed my mind about some of the views I held while preparing the anthology. In this Foreword I first try to supplement the original Introduction by discussing one major theme – the significance of religious voluntarism for moral philosophy – that I think I have come to understand more fully than I did. I then make some comments about how moral philosophers may benefit from the study of the history of their subject.

I have added a brief bibliography, listing some of the work on the history of early modern moral philosophy that has appeared since the anthology was completed. In the body of the reprint I have been able only to correct a few minor errors and typographical mistakes.

Contemporary moral philosophy outside the Roman Catholic tradition arose from debates about three views that had been developed by the end of the eighteenth century: utilitarianism, intuitionism, and Kantianism. These alternatives were not among the theories available to thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The texts reprinted here enable the reader to see how and why the newer positions emerged from discussions of moral philosophy in early modern Europe.