This anthology grew out of the frustration I came increasingly to feel because of the unavailability of texts I wanted to use in teaching the history of modern moral philosophy. Of course, the ethical writings of Hobbes, Butler, Hume, Bentham, and Kant are and have been regularly available, and it is easy to fill a term with discussions of their work. From time to time I taught the history of ethics doing just that. But I quickly came to realize that analysis and criticism of the arguments of these five philosophers did not give students a real picture of the development of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The philosophers' writings alone could not convey a sense of the alternatives already available to each of them, nor could they give the students a sense of what besides technical considerations might have motivated their authors to accept, alter, or go entirely beyond existing views. I came to think that if I did not include some of the less frequently studied writers from the period and did not get beyond critical analysis of the arguments, I could not be sure that I was not using my canonical subjects simply as starting points for discussing problems I happened to find important at the moment. And however valuable such a course might be, it would not be a course in the history of the field.

When I tried to move beyond this way of teaching, however, I was blocked by the difficulty of providing source material.