Anscombe’s Challenge

“Modern Moral Philosophy” is the title Elizabeth Anscombe gave to her famous broadside against the ethical philosophy she found around her in the middle of the twentieth century (Anscombe Reference Anscombe1958).Footnote ¹ Anscombe’s chief complaint was that her contemporaries remained under the influence of a fundamentally mistaken turn that Western ethical thought had taken in the modern period, beginning roughly, I will suggest, with Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century.Footnote ²

Anscombe’s most basic problem with modern ethical philosophy was that it is, as she put it, “moral philosophy.” It concerns, even if not exclusively, what it calls morality: a set of putatively universal deontic or “juridical” norms of right and wrong that purport to obligate all normal human adults, indeed, all moral agents, as it terms beings who have the capacity to respond to obligation (5).Footnote ³ Anscombe called this a “law conception” of ethics (5), since it posits a moral law of right and wrong, what Grotius and his followers called “natural law.”

All societies are structured by laws or social norms (mores) in some way, of course. But what modern ethical philosophers called and still call “morality” transcends socially constituted norms. Of any social or legal obligation, we can always ask whether it obligates us morally, that is, whether it would be morally wrong, and not just against social convention or illegal, or even our society’s moral beliefs, to violate it. Moral right and wrong can never be settled by looking simply to a society’s laws or mores. They concern morality’s norms.

This is not always apparent, since we use “morality” both as a count noun and as a non-count noun. In the count-noun sense there are as many moralities as there are societies with different mores (and perhaps different individual moral codes). Moralities, in this sense, are things we can count in the actual world. “Morality” in the sense that modern moral philosophers are concerned with, however, is not a countable aspect of actuality. It is an essentially normative deontic structure.Footnote ⁴ When modern moral philosophers use “morality” to refer to this normative structure, they are using it in a non-count sense that contrasts with the count-noun sense of “morality.”

Moreover, what modern philosophers call “moral agents,” those who are subject to morality, is determined not by membership in any actual society, but by having certain capacities of thought and will that philosophers dub “moral agency.” These include the capacity to guide themselves by the moral law, which binds each simply as one moral agent among others. “Moral agent,” or “Person,” as Locke puts it, “is a Forensick Term” that “belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law” (Locke Reference Leibniz and Grua1975: 346).

Anscombe thought it obvious, however, that no practical law of any kind can exist without a lawgiver. So there can be a moral law only if it has a legislator whose jurisdiction transcends any posited earthly realm, even, indeed, that of the international law (jus gentium) that Grotius himself helped to originate in the early modern period.Footnote ⁵ Anscombe concluded that there can be such a thing as morality only if it is legislated by God.

The idea that morality binds only because it is divinely legislated has certainly been represented in modern moral philosophy, for example, in seventeenth-century natural lawyers like Pufendorf and Locke. But it has been a decidedly minority view. Most modern philosophers have been content to employ the essentially juridical concept of morality without any such grounding in divine legislation.Footnote ⁶ Grotius is an excellent example. And many deny that morality is even the kind of thing that could be legislated, even by God. It is not some actual thing that was made actual by creation or legislation. It is an essentially normative deontic structure.

Anscombe thought that this left modern deontic concepts with no “discernible content except a certain compelling [‘psychological’] force” (Anscombe Reference Anscombe1958: 18). Deontic moral concepts certainly do not present as psychological concepts, however. How could they present as such and have the distinctive normative purport that has been thought to be morality’s hallmark? We take morality to purport to be essentially normative, to provide us with normative reasons for acting.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, we take morality to purport to obligate us in an essentially normative way, to make violations not just unwise or imprudent but morally wrong: things we are accountable for not doing and for which we incur culpability and guilt when we do them without excuse. How could anything like that follow from psychological facts alone?

So powerful is this idea and so insidious is the moderns’ error, Anscombe thought, that the concept of moral obligation is often invoked as a necessary ground even for divine law itself. In order for God’s laws to obligate, it is said – for example, by the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth – we must be obligated to follow God’s legislation independently of his legislative act.Footnote ⁸ Any moral obligation to comply with God’s commands cannot, Cudworth argued, itself be created by his commands. If Anscombe is right, however, the very idea of such a legislation-independent obligation is fundamentally confused. Philosophers who employ it end up deploying a contentless concept having only psychological force.

“Anscombe’s Challenge,” as we can call it, indicts much of the thought that ethical philosophers have produced in the West since the early seventeenth century. As we shall see, Anscombe is unquestionably right that a central feature of “modern moral philosophy” has been its fundamentally deontic or juridical character. Modern moral philosophers have indeed been concerned to articulate, understand, defend, and attempt to ground morality with its distinctively obligating normativity.

Even modern critics of the idea of morality – most prominently, Nietzsche, but also more qualified critics like Bernard Williams – have focused on the deontic features that Anscombe identifies. In seeking to overturn or at least rein in morality, they have implicitly accepted her point that deontic morality has been a, if not the, central focus of modern ethical thought (Nietzsche Reference Miller2007; Williams Reference Tuck1985: 1–4, 174–196).

To appreciate the distinctiveness of this conception of deontic morality, compare it to the view of ethics one finds in Plato and Aristotle. Notably, the term “morality” does not even appear in standard English translations of Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, though it sometimes does in commentaries on these texts.Footnote ⁹ For Plato and Aristotle, the central ethical concepts all concern species of the good: virtue, intrinsically good or noble (kalon) action, and the good or benefit (eudaimonia) of human beings. Much of what modern ethical philosophers consider under the heading of morality, Plato and Aristotle discuss under the virtue of justice or intrinsically good just action.

When Socrates is challenged by Glaucon and Adeimantus at the beginning of Plato’s Republic to say why we should be just, his reply is not that justice is morally obligatory or that others’ rights provide, in themselves, reasons to respect them. Rather, Plato has Socrates argue that justice is both instrumentally and intrinsically good for the just person.Footnote ¹⁰

But consider how a modern like H. A. Prichard responded to arguments like this near the beginning of the twentieth century. Prichard maintains that such arguments “rest” “moral philosophy … on a mistake” (Prichard Reference Parfit1912: 21–37). That complying with the moral law can benefit us, even intrinsically, is an important fact; but it is not one, Prichard argues, that can either explain why morality obligates us or establish any reason for being moral that might flow directly from its doing so. For these tasks, Socrates’s argument provides a reason of the wrong kind.

Sidgwick’s Contrast

The great nineteenth-century moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick made a similar point when he wrote that according to “the Greek schools” of ethics,

As Anscombe would later, Sidgwick argued that modern moral philosophy differs from the ethical thought of the ancient Greeks in viewing the “quasi-jural” or deontic notion of moral duty or right as distinct from any “species of the Good.”

Sidgwick drew a further, related contrast between ancient and modern ethics concerning what philosophers these days call “normativity” or the force of normative reasons or oughts:

Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient thinkers tend to be eudaimonists, holding that all normative reasons for action must derive from the agent’s own good or happiness (eudaimonia) broadly conceived, even when it comes to virtue and justice.Footnote ¹³ In Socrates’s exchange with Glaucon and Adeimantus, it is simply assumed by all parties that if Socrates cannot establish that it is intrinsically or extrinsically beneficial to the just person to be just, he will not have shown any reason for them to act justly rather than, say, simply to appear to be doing so.

According to Sidgwick, however, “the modern ethical view” allows for the position that Prichard clearly assumes, namely, that the fact that an action would unjustly wrong someone and therefore be morally wrong is or entails in itself sufficient reason not to do it. “Conscience,” the mental power through which we make moral judgments, can be a “regulative and governing faculty” in its own right, an aspect of practical reason itself.Footnote ¹⁴ According to Sidgwick’s moderns, deontic morality can provide an independent source of normative reasons and oughts that are additional to those provided by any species of the good. As we shall see, even modern eudaimonists or rational egoists who hold that all reasons for acting must come from (the agent’s) good, like Locke, nonetheless often maintain that moral right and obligation are independent ethical ideas that cannot be reduced to any “species of the good.”

There are two separate but related aspects to what we can call “Sidgwick’s Contrast.” First, many moderns claim that the deontic concept of moral right or obligation is irreducible to any species of the good. And second, an important strain of modern ethical philosophy, at least, holds that the right has a normative practical force that is additional to that of the good.

Modern Moral Philosophy’s Shadow I

Obviously, I have chosen my title with Anscombe’s essay in mind. I agree with Anscombe, Sidgwick, and others (most notably, John Rawls and J. B. Schneewind) that the “quasi-jural” or “law conception” of morality has been at the very heart of ethical philosophy in the West, roughly from Grotius on (Rawls Reference Price and Raphael2000; Schneewind Reference Roberts1998). Of course, not all modern ethical philosophy can be categorized as moral philosophy in Anscombe’s sense. Just to take one example, G. E. Moore famously argued in Principia Ethica (Moore Reference Mandeville1993) that the concept of intrinsic good (though not that of a person’s good) is the single fundamental ethical concept, an ineliminable kernel of any ethical concept.

About the concept of moral right, Moore there says that “to assert that a certain line of conduct is, at a given time, absolutely right or obligatory is obviously to assert that more good or less evil will exist in the world, if it be adopted than if anything else be done instead” (Moore Reference Mandeville1993: 77). Clearly, there is nothing irreducibly juridical or deontic about the notions expressed by “right” and “obligatory” as Moore defines them in Principia. If what it means to say that an act is morally right or obligatory is just that it produces the most good, then the claim that it is morally right or obligatory to produce the most good is not a deontic normative claim. It is what Parfit calls a “concealed tautology” (Parfit Reference Murdoch2011: II:276).

In using deontic moral terms like “right” and “obligatory” to express his views, however, Moore is arguing against and arguably trying to co-opt more orthodox deontologically minded moral philosophers of his time like Prichard. Thus, even though Moore’s philosophical project is not itself moral philosophy in Anscombe’s sense, his use of deontic moral terms is testimony to modern moral philosophy’s powerful influence.

Even more obviously, if anyone counts as a modern ethical philosopher, Nietzsche surely does, though he is hardly a moral philosopher in Anscombe’s sense. Even so, the idea of morality unquestionably looms large in Nietzsche’s thought. On the Genealogy of Morality is devoted to understanding what Nietzsche argues to be the concept’s questionable origins and to a critique of “the value of these [i.e., morality’s] values” (Nietzsche Reference Miller2007: 7).

Thus, even when ethical philosophers in the West from the seventeenth century on have not been doing moral philosophy, strictly so called, their thought has often been shaped by it. Either their terms bear the influence of modern moral philosophy, as with Moore; their projects are defined in opposition to it, as with Nietzsche; or their thought is formulated and received against modern moral philosophy’s background and in its shadow.

Modern Metaethics

My aim in this book and the one to follow is to investigate central aspects of Western ethical philosophy from the publication of Hugo Grotius’s The Rights of War and Peace in 1625 through the end of the twentieth century, using Anscombe’s and Sidgwick’s characterizations as reference points. Mostly I will be concerned with philosophers’ attempts to understand, articulate, defend, and ground morality, as well as to grapple with the distinctive metaphysical and epistemological questions that arise in relation to it, metaethical questions, as we now call them. Are there moral truths, and if so, what makes them true? What is the relation between any metaphysical basis morality might require and that needed by the natural sciences that began to take a recognizably modern shape in the seventeenth century? Has modern moral philosophy the resources to respond adequately to Anscombe’s Challenge and to Nietzsche’s and his followers’ critiques? On the epistemological side: can we acquire moral knowledge? And if so, how might that be related to moral motivation?

Although philosophers since the ancient Greeks have concerned themselves with fundamental metaphysical and epistemological questions about ethics, metaethics as a subfield of ethical philosophy did not exist before the modern era, arguably, not before the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁵ It was only in the aftermath of Moore’s Principia Ethica that philosophers began to distinguish and focus on so-called second-order issues about ethical language and concepts and their relation to questions in the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and epistemology as a distinct area of inquiry, separable from “first-order” “normative ethics” (Mackie Reference Locke and Laslett1977).

Surely, one aspect of the modern period that stimulated metaethical thought was the decline of Aristotelian teleological metaphysics alongside the rise of modern science. If nature is not itself teleological, this forces the question of what place value can have “in a world of fact” (Köhler Reference Kant, Louden and Zöller1938). Another factor is that metaethical questions sometimes turn on technical issues in logic and the philosophies of language and mind, whose tools required the increasing specialization of the twentieth century to be developed sufficiently to pursue metaethics in a focused, fruitful way.

I speculate that a further important factor that led to metaethical reflection in the modern period, however, concerns Sidgwick’s Contrast. So long as there is believed to be only a single fundamental ethical concept, the good, the question need not arise of what makes something an ethical or normative concept in general, or of what the “sources of normativity” are (Korsgaard Reference Kant, Rorty and Schmidt1996a). No distinction between evaluative and normative concepts and questions seems possible. Once, however, there are thought to be two fundamental ethical notions, the good and the right, these more general and fundamental metaethical questions begin to seem unavoidable.Footnote ¹⁶

Moreover, once it is believed, for example, by the early modern natural lawyer Francisco Suárez, that the deontic moral concept of right has a distinctive normative profile that differs from that of the good – that the morally right obligates whereas the good recommends – these philosophical questions can seem even more urgent. As we shall see, Suárez makes a fundamental distinction between law and counsel, the influence of which extends through Grotius, Hobbes, Kant, and the moral philosophy that follows them.Footnote ¹⁷ This focuses Prichard’s question and also opens up philosophical space for thinkers like Nietzsche to argue that even if the good can be adequately grounded, the putatively obligatory normativity of morality (the right) cannot be.

In addition to these metaethical issues, modern moral philosophers have also grappled with substantive normative questions both at the level of normative moral theory and in thinking about specific cases. The familiar dispute between deontology and consequentialism is itself a creature of the modern period, requiring morality’s hallmark deontic categories even to be formulated. It is worth bearing in mind that though it begins with a view about the good, consequentialism is itself a view about the good’s relation to the right. Mill begins Utilitarianism, indeed, by saying that nothing is “more significant of the backward state” of ethical knowledge than the “little progress” that has been made in determining “the criterion of right and wrong” (Mill Reference Long2002: I:1). It is to this matter of deontic morality that utilitarianism and consequentialism more generally have historically been addressed.

Modern Moral Philosophy’s Shadow II

Modern philosophy about morality will not, however, be my sole focus. I seek also to understand and situate aspects of modern ethical philosophy that are not moral philosophy in Anscombe’s sense. Some of these concern traditional questions about the good – both, what kind of life is best for human beings, and, what is intrinsically choiceworthy – questions that have been a staple of ethical philosophizing since the ancient Greeks. But much such philosophy in the modern period, I shall be arguing, must nonetheless be understood in relation to modern moral philosophy, even when its aims are profoundly different. Sometimes this is because, as with Nietzsche and Williams, ethical conceptions are put forward in opposition to morality, as a replacement for or at least as a counterbalance to it. And sometimes, as with Moore, a philosopher’s project may not itself concern deontic morality, but still be formulated in moral philosophy’s distinctive deontic terms.

Different varieties of modern virtue ethics provide a particularly interesting example. Some virtue ethicists, like Francis Hutcheson in the seventeenth century and Rosalind Hursthouse in the late twentieth, put forward their theories in a moral philosophical idiom. Hutcheson is concerned with what he calls “moral goodness,” which he distinguishes from “natural goodness.” And Hursthouse draws on an account of moral virtue to ground a theory of what makes actions morally right or wrong (Hutcheson Reference Hume and Grieg2004; Hursthouse Reference Hostler1999). But modern virtue ethicists also often advance their virtue theories in opposition to deontic moral theories. Hume is a leading example. And a major aim of Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” in 1958, after all, was to wean her readers from that subject and return them to a virtue-centered Aristotelian approach.

As it happened, the 1960s and 1970s intervened, with movements for social and political equality that made issues of justice and rights inescapable, forming a backdrop for Rawls’s monumental A Theory of Justice, which commanded the moral philosophical scene through the 1970s (Rawls Reference Pink1971). This required deontic moral philosophy, since there can be no moral rights without moral duties.

It was only in the 1980s, in a very different sociopolitical climate, that the revival of virtue ethics for which Anscombe called began to take place, frequently formulated in non-deontic terms, as by writers like Alasdair MacIntyre and Annette Baier, and sometimes put forward in opposition to morality, as in Michael Slote’s From Morality to Virtue (MacIntyre Reference Locke and Nidditch1981; Baier Reference Baier1985; Slote Reference Sellars1992).Footnote ¹⁸

The Case of Kant

Perhaps the most fascinating example of a philosopher whose thinking is shaped, and in some ways arguably distorted, by the modern moral philosophical frame, is Kant. On the face of it, Kant’s ethics can seem a paradigm of moral philosophy in the modern idiom, a textbook example of deontological ethics and an archetypical theory of the “moral law.” I shall argue, however, that on closer inspection the deontic categories of duty, obligation, and the moral law are, for Kant, only the shadow for finite rational beings of how a fully rational being would choose and act. Fully rational deliberation, according to Kant, always only involves questions of the good (albeit the intrinsically choiceworthy rather than agents’ good – das Gute vs das Wohl) and not deontic moral questions.

This means that duty, obligation, and the moral law have no independent normative force for Kant. Kant’s response to Anscombe’s Challenge is that it is reason that commands us finite rational beings to do what it is best (what there is most reason) for us to do, hence what a fully rational being would do in our place. But two questions then arise. What can give reason this distinctively deontic power, if it is itself concerned exclusively with the good? And how can reason create any further reason to do something by commanding what it has already determined there is independently reason to do? Any such deontic aspect would seem to be normatively epiphenomenal. And if that is so, morality itself may end up being epiphenomenal on Kant’s view also.

Despite this, Kant’s emphasis on freedom and what he calls “autonomy” is unquestionably modern and unlike anything to be found among the ancient Greeks or in ethical philosophy of the medieval period that derives from them. Moreover, I shall argue that the emphasis on the distinctive freedom of a deliberating rational agent in modern philosophers like Cudworth, Locke, and Samuel Clarke even before Kant, as well as in Kant himself, derives from their taking it to be necessary for the very possibility of morality and moral obligation. And this surely is an essential feature of philosophers who follow in Kant’s wake, most obviously, Fichte and Hegel, but also Kierkegaard and, arguably, even Nietzsche.

(Relatively) Modest Aspirations

I do not aspire to anything like a comprehensive treatment of modern ethics in this volume. Even were I capable of writing such a book, we already have in T. H. Irwin’s magisterial, three-volume The Development of Ethics a more widely ranging and detailed treatment, even of just modern ethics, than perhaps anyone else can or will be able to provide (Irwin Reference Hursthouse2007, Reference Huseyinzadegan2008, Reference Hutcheson2009). Irwin devotes almost all of his second and third volumes to the modern period, nearly nineteen hundred pages. I seek something significantly more modest.

There is a further difference between Irwin’s treatment and what I aim for here. Irwin tends to downplay the significance of Anscombe’s and Sidgwick’s contrasts and argues that much of the modern period carries forward a tradition of ethical thought that is continuous with that of the ancient Greeks. What Irwin calls Aristotelian naturalism is a combination of views he finds first in Aristotle, but which he argues carries through the ancient Stoics, notably Cicero, Aquinas’s classical theory of natural law, and, in Irwin’s view, many modern figures from Grotius on, including Grotius himself.

Aristotelian naturalists, according to Irwin, hold a teleological view of practical reason; they maintain that rational action aims always and only at the good. They are also eudaimonists, holding that the final rational end is the agent’s own good or eudaimonia. They thus deny that deontic standards of moral right or obligation can provide reasons for acting that are independent of the agent’s good. As Irwin emphasizes, this does not mean that Aristotelian naturalists cannot recognize distinctively moral virtues or intrinsically good moral acts that differ from other nonmoral virtues or noble action. Like Cicero, they can recognize a category of duty (officium) or right action (honestum) and hold, moreover, that there is reason to conform to moral duty or right even when it is not advantageous in the sense of being instrumentally beneficial (commodium or utile), because it is intrinsically beneficial.

Nevertheless, for Aristotelian naturalists like Cicero and Aquinas, duty and right are not identified independently of the good; they rather concern a species of good, the common good. Also, any reason that agents have to comply with their moral duty depends on their own good or eudaimonia, albeit by virtue of compliance’s being intrinsically, rather than just instrumentally, good for them. There is, as Cicero puts it, a bonum honestum, an intrinsic benefit in being moral and just, as indeed Socrates argues in The Republic and as Aristotle implies in the Nicomachean Ethics when he maintains that eudaimonia consists in virtuous (including just) activity (Irwin 2007: 620, Reference Huseyinzadegan2008: 31–32).

Finally, Irwin calls this position Aristotelian naturalism since it maintains that an intrinsically beneficial, virtuous life is one that best realizes our rational human nature. This means that when Irwin classifies a modern moral theorist like Grotius as an Aristotelian naturalist, he is interpreting him as holding that morality’s normative force derives from the fact that moral conduct realizes the agent’s good by virtue of realizing his rational human nature. On an Aristotelian naturalist view, morality can have no normative force that is independent of the agent’s good; nothing can. It can provide, in Suárez’s terms, only counsel and not genuinely obligating law.

Irwin writes at the beginning of The Development of Ethics that were he to give his volumes an “ampler title” on the model of some seventeenth- or eighteenth-century works, he might have chosen The Development of Ethics: being a selective historical study of moral philosophy in the Socratic tradition with special attention to Aristotelian naturalism (Reference Hursthouse2007: 1).

I agree that viewing the history of ethics, including that of the modern period, through the lens of Aristotelian naturalism provides an interesting and insightful interpretative prospect. But it is far from the only one. The history of modern ethics presented in this book will be guided by a very different viewpoint, one that, in my view, Irwin’s Development insufficiently appreciates. The thread that will run throughout these volumes is that ethics in the modern period is best appreciated in relation to moral philosophy conceived in the deontic terms Anscombe identifies, through the lens of Sidgwick’s claim that much modern ethical thought recognizes the morally right as having an independent normative force that is irreducible to that of the good.

I would like to say something in conclusion here, however inadequate, about race, sex, and gender as these enter into our history. No one can reasonably doubt that the larger culture that produced and supported philosophy and its publication during the modern period was, and remains, sexist and racist, patriarchal and white supremacist. It is not at all surprising, therefore, not just that so little published work was produced by women or people of color, but also that so many philosophers, including many here discussed, were themselves racist, sexist, or both. At least one philosopher who will be especially central to our story, Kant, himself produced a theory of races (Kant Reference Kames2013b).

There is really no way to deal adequately with issues of race, sex, and gender, and other forms of epistemic and, indeed, philosophical oppression in a history such as this. I agree with Lucy Allais and Dilek Huseyinzadegan that, for example, Kant’s racism is not a sufficient reason not to study his works (Allais Reference Allais2016; Huseyinzadegan Reference Howard2018). Kant’s ideas have not simply had great importance for philosophy; his doctrine of the equal dignity of persons has also had special significance in movements to resist racist and sexual oppression.Footnote ¹⁹ Still, some of what Kant says certainly bears the imprint of his racial, sexual, class, and Eurocentric position, and, as Allais and Huseyinzadegan point out, studying his works in context provides an opportunity for us to think about how our own moral and philosophical thought and practice bear those marks as well (Allais Reference Allais2016; Huseyinzadegan Reference Howard2018). We shall have occasion to return to this theme at the end of this volume’s final chapter, which is on Rousseau and Kant.

There will be many more men discussed in the following pages than women, as well as more white philosophers than philosophers of color.Footnote ²⁰ Although women philosophers of the early modern period have begun to be more closely studied, many, like Mary Astell, Margaret Cavendish, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Anne Conway, Mary Shepherd, and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, are more notable for their metaphysical and epistemological views than for their ethical philosophy (Atherton Reference Atherton1994).Footnote ²¹ It is only in the second half of twentieth century, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, that women came to be widely recognized as important ethical philosophers. Anscombe’s Challenge in “Modern Moral Philosophy” (in 1957) frames our study, albeit retrospectively. And the post–World War II period also features Foot, Beauvoir, and Murdoch, all of whom produced ethical philosophy of enduring value.Footnote ²² Their works and those of numerous later prominent women philosophers, like Hursthouse, (Annette) Baier, Wolf, and Korsgaard will be central to the closing chapters of the volume to follow.Footnote ²³

Finally, that volume will conclude with a chapter titled “Theorizing Oppression and Nonideal Theory,” which will discuss a steadily growing movement by academic philosophers in the latter third of the twentieth century and early twenty-first attempting to come to terms with systematic sexual and racial oppression. This begins with philosophical responses to the civil rights movement and continues with discussions of affirmative action and other attempts to address past racial and gender injustice and to eliminate it in the present (see, e.g., Boxill Reference Boxill1984, Reference Boxill2003). As formal and informal barriers to entry to academic philosophy began to be removed for women and philosophers of color, the topics that are considered to be moral philosophical topics of significance have changed accordingly.

The most notable development has been the pursuit of what has come to be called, following Charles Mills, “nonideal” moral and political theory, which attempts to theorize justice, not under ideal conditions, but in circumstances of historical and ongoing oppression, most especially the kind of white supremacy that has characterized the United States (Mills Reference Lu-Adler1997, Reference Lu-Adler2005). Although the terms “ideal” and “nonideal theory” come from Rawls, Mills has been the founding and central figure of nonideal theory, showing philosophers the need for moral- and political-philosophical accounts of urgent injustice that Rawls’s ideal theory leaves out. Also important have been Elizabeth Anderson and Tommie Shelby (Anderson Reference Anderson2010, Reference Anderson2014; Shelby Reference Schliesser, O’Neill and Lascano2005, Reference Schneewind2016). Nonideal moral and political theories have been pursued as well in fields like epistemology, as in Miranda Fricker’s pathbreaking work on epistemic injustice (Fricker Reference Fordyce and Kennedy2007).

All of this will be discussed at the end of the volume to follow the current one, which will take us from Fichte and Hegel through the end of a (long) twentieth century. The present volume, however, ends with Kant and begins with a moral philosopher who is justifiably regarded as the founding figure of modern moral philosophy, Hugo Grotius. To him we now turn.