Contemporary Moral Philosophy
By G. J. Warnock
From the introduction: “The aim of this essay is to provide a compendious survey of moral philosophy in English since about the beginning of the present century. Fortunately, the tale that thus falls to be told is not in outline excessively complex, and can be seen as a quite intelligible sequence of distinguishable episodes……It will be found that my critical discussions of the major doctrines to be surveyed are (I fear) somewhat uniformly hostile; and I have brought in, in the later pages of my essay, perhaps more controversial matter than would ordinarily be looked for in a mainly expository review. But I would defend this, if I had to, as lying in the nature of the case. For the case is, I believe, that the successive orthodoxies of moral philosophy in English in the present century have been, notwithstanding the often admirable acumen of their authors, remarkably barren. Certain questions about the nature and the basis of moral judgment which have been regarded, at least in the past, as centrally important have not only not been examined in recent theories; those theories have seemed deliberately to hold that, on those questions, there is nothing whatever that can usefully be said….”
Macmillan St. Martin’s Press. 1867. 88p.