A Short History of Ethics
Alasdair MacIntyre
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 026801759X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Computer Ethics: A Case-based Approach
A Short History of Ethics (Routledge Classics)
III, 1, 1. 48. Ibid., III, 2, 1. 49. Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, V, 2. 50. De L’Esprit des Lois, XXIV, 24. 51. Du Contrat Social, II, 3. 52. On the Saying: That may be all right in Theory but it is no good in Practice, in Kant, edited and translated by G. Rabel. 53. Hegel: A Re-examination, p. 111. 54. Discussion of Press Debates, in Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, I, 1, i. 55. History of Philosophy and Religion in Germany, translated by J. Snodgrass, p. 158. 56. Ibid., pp.
While finally the would-be despot is able to enlist from such a democracy enough dissatisfied malcontents to create a tyranny. Plato’s aim here is at least twofold; he has placed the actual forms of constitution of Greek city-states upon a moral scale, so that even if we cannot have the ideal, we know that timocracy (traditional Sparta) is best, oligarchy (Corinth) and democracy (Athens) worse, and tyranny (Syracuse) worst of all. But his argument also brings out that one reason why they can be.
Equally clearly it fails to satisfy others. We take pleasure in what we do well (unimpeded activity again), and thus taking pleasure in an activity is a criterion of doing it as we wish to do it, of achieving the τ☐λος of that action. A τ☐λος must be a reason for acting, and that we would get pleasure is always a reason for acting, even if not always a finally conclusive one. Pleasure, too, is not only sought by almost everybody, and therefore appears to be a universal τ☐λος but it cannot be a.
For example, I wrote that it is not possible to “look to human nature as a neutral standard, asking which form of social and moral life will give to it the most adequate expression. For each form of life carries with it its own picture of human nature” (p. 268). Nonetheless I was very far from being any sort of consistent relativist, as Peter Winch acutely noted in a critical discussion of A Short History of Ethics in which he accused me not of relativism, but, and more justly, of incoherence.
External observer. It is in the course of this account that a famous phrase enters the history of ethics for the first time, when Hutcheson asserts that “that nation is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers, and that worst which in like manner occasions misery,”39 and so becomes the father of utilitarianism. The reason why we could not hope to find any adequate answer to Mandeville in either Shaftesbury or Hutcheson is fairly clear. Both of them assimilate ethics to.