Ethical Philosophers and Their Philosophies

Socrates of Athens

470 BCE

He believes “the unexamined life is not worth living.” One must seek knowledge and wisdom before private interests. In this manner, knowledge is sought as a means to ethical action. What one truly knows is the dictates of one's conscience or soul: these ideas form the philosophy of the Socratic Paradox.

Plato

427 BCE

Like most other ancient philosophers, Plato maintains a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics. That is to say, happiness or well-being (eudaimonia) is the highest aim of moral thought and conduct, and the virtues (aretê: 'excellence') are the requisite skills and dispositions needed to attain it.

Aristotle

384 BCE

Aristotle's ethics, or study of character, is built around the premise that people should achieve an excellent character (a virtuous character, "ethikē aretē" in Greek) as a pre-condition for attaining happiness or well-being (eudaimonia).

Augustine

354

Augustine argues that to become righteous, wise and holy in eternity like God, man must seek to grow in virtue, knowledge and love now by submitting his intellect and will, disordered by sin, to God's perfect Charity.

Thomas Aquinas

1225

According to Aquinas, all human actions are governed by a general principle or precept that is foundational to and necessary for all practical reasoning: good is to be done and evil is to be avoided. This principle is not something we can ignore or defy.

Francis Bacon

1561

Bacon was a devout Anglican. He believed that philosophy and the natural world must be studied inductively, but argued that we can only study arguments for the existence of God. Information on his attributes (such as nature, action, and purposes) can only come from special revelation.

René Descartes

1596

According to Descartes, virtue, at its essence, is a property of the will, not the intellect. Virtue consists in the firm and constant resolution to use the will well, which requires determining one's best practical judgments and executing them to the best of one's abilities.

John Locke

1632

It is the science, Locke says, of using the powers that we have as human beings in order to act in such a way that we obtain things that are good and useful for us. As he says: ethics is “the seeking out those Rules, and Measures of humane Actions, which lead to Happiness, and the Means to practice them”

Immanuel Kant

1724

Kant's ethics are organized around the notion of a “categorical imperative,” which is a universal ethical principle stating that one should always respect the humanity in others, and that one should only act in accordance with rules that could hold for everyone.

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

1770

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) developed a philosophy based on freedom within a wider philosophical system offering novel views on topics ranging from property and punishment to morality and the state. Hegel's main work was the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (“PR”) first published in 1821.

Charles Darwin

1809

Darwin accepts the greatest-happiness principle as a standard of right and wrong. Hence, an action can be judged as good if it improves the greatest happiness of the greatest number, by either increasing pleasure or decreasing pain.

John Dewey

1859

Dewey's ethics replaces the goal of identifying an ultimate end or supreme ethical principle with the goal of identifying a method for improving our value judgments. Dewey argued that ethical inquiry is the use of reflective intelligence to revise our judgments in light of the consequences of acting on them.