ENGLISH

Sacrifice Regained: Morality and Self-interest in British Moral Philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham

By Roger Crisp

Book information

Publisher
Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press
Year
2019
ISBN
9780198840473, 0198840470, 9780191880131
DOI
10.1093/oso/9780198840473.001.0001
LCC
BJ602 .C75 2019
Google Books ID
TAulDwAAQBAJ
Open Library ID
OL28727422M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
1 MB (1278749 bytes)
Pages
x, 233\244
Orientation
portrait
Paginated
yes
Scanned
no
Time added
2025-01-24 13:58:44
morality; virtue; self-interest; happiness; well-b

Description

Does being virtuous make you happy? This book examines the answers to this ancient question provided by the so-called ‘British Moralists’, from about 1650 for the next two hundred years. This involves elucidating their views on happiness (self-interest, or well-being) and on virtue (or morality), in order to bring out the relation of each to the other. Themes ran through many of these writers: psychological egoism, evaluative hedonism, and—after Thomas Hobbes—the acceptance of self-standing moral reasons. But there are exceptions, and even those taking the standard views adopt them for very different reasons and express them in various ways. As the ancients tended to believe that virtue and happiness largely, perhaps entirely, coincide, so these modern authors are inclined to accept posthumous reward and punishment. Both positions sit uneasily with the common-sense idea that a person can truly sacrifice their own good for the sake of morality or for others, and the book shows that David Hume—a hedonist whose ethics made no appeal to the afterlife—was the first major British moralist to allow for, indeed to recommend, such self-sacrifice. Morality and well-being of course remain central to modern ethics, and this book demonstrates how much there is to learn from this remarkable group of philosophers.

Similar books